World of Change

Inspired by our 10th anniversary, the Earth Observatory has pulled together a special series of NASA satellite images documenting how our world—forests, oceans, human landscapes, even the Sun—has changed during the previous decade.

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.

Over the span of 11 years, the Sun's activity waxes and wanes as magnetic field lines that are wound and tangled inside the Sun periodically break through to the surface. This series of images shows sunspots and UV brightness generated by solar magnetic activity from 1999-2009.

In the years following the Persian Gulf War, Iraqi residents began reclaiming the country’s nearly decimated Mesopotamian marshes. This series of images documents the transformation of the fabled landscape between 2000 and 2009.