Bogoslof Island: a puzzle for geographers.
Bogoslov Island has a Russian sounding name and indeed belongs to the Aleutian Islands, Alaska which was sold by Russia to United States in 1867. It is actually the summit of a stratovolcano 1800 m height from the seabed and emerged from the ocean in late 1800 after an underwater eruption and since then has been
Wildfires in Val di Susa
Wildfires were raging Val di Susa during the last three days. Val di Susa is an alpine valley located in the western part of Piemonte, region of north Italy, west of Turin and bordering France. The state of emergency is due to the very long periods of drought and the wildfires were also fed by
In Endeavour’s wake: Madeira, 12 September 1768.
Green and mountainous Madeira is in view and we have time just to finish our crew’s tour. Joseph Banks and the scientific Team The Royal Society obtained the permission to send, at his own expense, Joseph Banks, a renowned botanist and natural scientist. Banks funded several others to join him: the Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander,
Rapid mapping of moving Glaciers
Responsible for the 10% of Greenland icebergs, the Jakobshavn Glacier is one of the largest outlet glaciers in the world. According to recent scientific studies it is also one of the fastest moving glaciers on Earth, Its speed can in fact reach on average up to 40 meters per day. Following the global warming effects,
Rainbow Mountains
On Earth there are a lot of natural wonders, some of them discovered only in the last decades and so become famous around the world only in recent times. This is the case of the colored mountains, aka rainbow mountains or montaña de siete colores. Those mountains offer a suggestive look thanks to the variegate
Irma’s Journey
Hurricane Irma was an extremely powerful and catastrophic cyclone, the strongest observed in the Atlantic Ocean since Wilma in 2005 in terms of maximum sustained winds. Irma developed on August 30, 2017 near the Cape Verde Islands, from a tropical wave that had moved off the west African coast three days prior. Under favorable conditions, Irma rapidly intensified
Volcanoes seen by Sentinel-2
On Earth, 500-600 Volcanoes exist. A volcano is a relief of the terrestrial crust (submarine or air) formed by the ejection and stacking material from the rise of magma in the form of lava ash. Volcanic activity can take several forms; each of them depends on the quantity of gases present in the magma and
Amazonia Deforestation from Sentinels
The Amazon rainforest represents over half of the planet’s remaining equatorial forests. A real Earth’s hearth and lungs threatened by the human uncontrolled activity. Its deforestation started mainly in the early seventies after the opening of the trans-Amazonian highway (1972). Amongst the principal causes of the progressive logging, the farming and cattle pasture spaces needs are the
The Eye of Sahara
In Mauritania, hidden deep into the great Sahara desert, there is a huge and mysterious geologic formation that is hard to spot from ground level, walking around on Earth. It turns out that we really discovered this incredible bull’s-eye in the sand only when we began sending humans into space when the Gemini IV mission (1965), a
Once upon a time in the Nuclear Old West
There is a place in the middle of the Old Wild West, which in the recent past earned the nickname of “the most bombed place on Earth”. We are in the Nevada Test Site (USA) 105 Kilometers northwest from Las Vegas, where from 1951 till 1992, the US government carried out almost 1000 nuclear bomb