Earth: Planet of Altered States

Please RATE and FAVORITE, and view full screen 1080p. Natural and human-caused change captured in these extraordinary image sequences covering years and decades of time. Read about the individual sequences on:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldOfChange/index.php

Earth is constantly changing. Some changes are a natural part of the climate system, such as the seasonal expansion and contraction of the Arctic sea ice pack. The responsibility for other changes, such as the Antarctic ozone hole, falls squarely on humanity’s shoulders. NASA’s World of Change series documents how our planet’s land, oceans, atmosphere, and Sun are changing over time.

Mt. St. Helens
The devastation of the May 18, 1980, eruption of Mt. St. Helens and the gradual recovery of the surrounding landscape is documented in this series of satellite images from 1979–2009.

Aral Sea
A massive irrigation project in the Kyzylkum Desert of central Asia has devastated the Aral Sea over the past 50 years. These images show the continued decline of the Southern Aral Sea in the past decade, as well as the first steps of recovery in the Northern Aral Sea in recent years.

Dubai
To expand the possibilities for beachfront tourist development, Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates, undertook a massive engineering project to create hundreds of artificial islands along its Persian Gulf coastline.

Yellowstone
In 1988, wildfires raced through Yellowstone National Park, consuming hundreds of thousands of acres. This series of Landsat images tracks the landscape’s slow recovery through 2008.

Southeast Australia
Drought has taken a severe toll on croplands in Southeast Australia during many years this decade.

Colorado River
Combined with human demands, a multi-year drought in the Upper Colorado River Basin caused a dramatic drop in the Colorado River’s Lake Powell in the early part of the 2000 decade. The lake began to recover in the latter part of the decade, but as of May 2010, it was still less