This week the Big Picture ran a series of pictures taken from the ISS looking down at Earth. It’s a great reminder that the Earth is in fact a very beautiful place and we should be honoured to be able to live here and experience it. Seeing the variety of colours and landscapes from the sky is a solitary consolation prize for spending so much time in airplanes. Being a total volcano nut, of course the pictures of the recent eruption of the Sarychev Peak volcano in the Russian Kuril Islands are my favourites.
Sarychev Peak began erupting in mid-June, spewing ash clouds up to heights of 8 km into the atmosphere. The plume broke through the clouds, giving the astronauts on board the ISS these fantastic views. The Kuril Islands range (see map below) is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire which is home to around three quarters of the world’s volcanoes and the venue for constant seismic activity.
More information on the eruption over at the Volcanism blog.
More on the ISS here, and I just discovered NASA’s fancy interactive flash tour, here.
[googlemaps http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&t=h&hl=en&msa=0&ll=47.813155,153.896484&spn=0.949887,2.82074&msid=102612200782456630642.00046d513e7e7e2d6e162&output=embed&w=425&h=350]
Image: NASA/JSC
Connect