Images & Animations
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Credit
Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC
Looking like fragments of shattered glass, shards of sea ice float in the Laptev Sea off the shore of Northern Siberia. The broken ice and deep blue of open water reveal the return of warmer temperatures to the north. The land itself, now free from winter’s snowy blanket, has acquired the faint green tint of early summer; only speckles of white remain where lakes are frozen over. Closer to the shore, the green pales where the coniferous Siberian forests (taiga) give way to the grasses and mosses of the Arctic tundra. The Lena River wends its way through the green forests onto the brown northern plains where it fragments into hundreds of channels that resemble the winter-bare branches of a mature tree. To the east of the river, MODIS has detected a handful of fires, which have been marked in red. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this photo-like image of Northern Siberia on July 1, 2005.
Metadata
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Sensor
Terra/MODIS -
Visualization Date
2005-07-01
