Earth as you've never seen it

Bernhard Edmaier has a series of photos in Time of very strange places here on Earth, from his new book EarthART:

On the Karlinger Kees Glacier in Austria, surfaces are white and gray in the summer, as the previous winter’s snow cover gradually melts away to reveal the many years’ worth of fissured ice beneath. The size and shape of these fissures depends on the flow speed of the ice, and on the unevenness of the ground over which the glacier slowly moves.

Innauen, on the German-Austrian border.  This tongue of land is part of the Lower Inn Reserve. The thin strip separates the turquoise-colored, fast-flowing water of the river Inn (left) from a green dead-water area populated with algae (right). A floodplain forest with white willow and black alder plants grows beside the wide, dense fields of reeds.

The Ragged Islands, which are among the smallest of the seven hundred Bahama Islands, are made of coralline limestone, and rise just a few meters above the surface of the water.

The Crozon Peninsula in Brittany, France. The color of this rock, which looks as if it has been splashed with paint, is due to chemical weathering. The sea pounds the dark, layered rock twice a day with the tides. The rock's gray iron compounds are then released, react with the oxygen in the air and the water, and are converted into yellow iron hydroxide.

Gibber Plains in Coober Pedy, Australia. The Australians call flat desert areas covered with loose rocks and stones of various sizes "gibber plains". At the Gibber Plains in Coober Pedy, Australia, each individual stone has a dark, often shimmering purple iron oxide crust. When rainfall flushes out the fragile pavement of these flagstoned deserts, or when gem hunters dig the ground for opals, then the pale subsoil becomes visible.

Searles Lake in Death Valley, California, a drainless lake in the Mojave Desert that sometimes collects rainwater. As the water evaporates in the heat of the sun, the lake becomes a marsh and the water turns to brine. Halophilic (or salt-loving) microorganisms that live in the seabed and that contain the same pigment found in tomatoes, then begin to multiply, giving the lake a distinctive red color.

Mount Etna in Sicily, Italy. The lava of the Sicilian volcano rolls like a glutinous pap into the nearby valley, finally stiffening into a heavy, brittle crust. It takes days, sometimes even weeks, for the magma, which is several hundred degrees Celsius, to cool down.

Landeyarsander in Iceland. In Iceland, plains of dark volcanic sand are home to a number of unreal-looking yellow and orange water landscapes. They occur wherever calcium-rich streams are able to spread over a large area just before they flow into the sea.

Eyjafjallajökul in Iceland. The gray ash clouds which shot several kilometers up into the atmosphere when the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted in the Spring of 2010, disrupted air travel across Europe and elsewhere for weeks. The larger lava particles rained down from the volcanic cloud and colored the glacier, which covered the volcano, black. Lava streams also caused the ice to melt in places and set destructive tidal waves in motion.

During long winter periods with no snow, glass-clear ice layers clear capable of bearing weight can form on Switzerland's Lake Silvaplana. Cracks made of air bubbles often form white patterns in the ice.

 and Kari Collins has a different series, also in Time, of satellite photos:

The tongue of the Malaspina Glacier, the largest glacier in Alaska, fills most of this image. The Malaspina lies west of Yakutat Bay and covers fifteen hundred square miles.

Once a vast carpet of healthy vegetation, the Amazon rain forest is changing rapidly. This image of Bolivia shows dramatic deforestation in the Amazon Basin. Loggers have cut long paths into the forest, while ranchers have cleared large blocks for their herds.

Surrounded by sand dunes, Lake Disappointment is an ephemeral salt lake in one of the most remote areas of western Australia. An early explorer supposedly named the lake in 1897, after following a number of creeks that he thought would lead to a large lake; they did, but the lake's extremely salty water was not drinkable.

What appears to be a stroke of thick red paint is actually a remarkable interplay of light and cloud in the Canadian Rockies. Angling through them is part of the Rocky Mountain Trench, a valley that extends from Montana in the USA to just south of the Yukon Territory. Low clouds filled a part of the Trench near the border between the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia.

Much of Oman is desert, but the Arabian Sea coast in the Dhofar region represents a startling difference in climate. This coastal region catches the monsoon rains, or khareef, during the summer months. Drenching rains fall primarily on the mountainous ridge that separates the lush, fertile areas along the coast from the arid interior.

Everglades National Park is the only subtropical preserve in North America.

The Ganges river forms an extensive delta where it empties into the Bay of Bengal. The delta is largely covered with a swamp forest known as the Sunderbans, which is home to the Royal Bengal Tiger.

In the style of Van Gogh's Starry Night, massive congregations of greenish phytoplankton swirl in the dark water around Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea. Phytoplankton are microscopic marine plants that form the first link in nearly all ocean food chains.

Guinea-Bissau is a small country in West Africa. Complex patterns can be seen in the shallow waters along its coastline, where silt carried by the Geba and other rivers washes out into the Atlantic Ocean.

This stretch of Iceland's northern coast resembles a tiger's head, complete with stripes of orange, black, and white. The tiger's mouth is the Eyjafjorour fjord that juts into the mainland between steep mountains. The name means "island fjord", derived from the tiny, tear-shaped Hrisey Island near its mouth.

Like poster paints run wild, this image reveals a montage of landscapes in Iran's largest desert, the Dasht-e Kavir, or Great Salt Desert. The almost uninhabited region covers an area of nearly thirty thousand square miles, and is a mix of dry streambeds, desert plateaus, mudflats, and salt marshes.

In Garden City, Kansas, center pivot irrigation systems created these circular patterns in crop land. The red circles indicate irrigated crops of healthy vegetation and the light-colored circles represent harvested crops.

The Lena River, some 2,800 miles long, is one of the largest rivers in the world. The Lena Delta Reserve is the most extensive protected wilderness area in Russia.

Snow-capped Colima Volcano rises abruptly from the surrounding landscape in the state of Jalisco in Mexico. Colima is actually a melding of two volcanoes, the older Nevado de Colima to the north and the younger, active Volcan de Colima to the south.

Turbid waters spill out into the Gulf of Mexico, where their suspended sediment is deposited to form the Mississippi River delta. Like the webbing on a duck's foot, marshes and mudflats prevail between the shipping channels that have been cut into the delta.

Coursing through parched, landlocked Mali in western Africa, the Niger River flows north through an ancient sand sea before turning sharply east to skirt the edge of the dune-striped Sahara. At the confluence of the Bani and Niger rivers is an island delta.

Along the southern coast of the Netherlands, sediment-laden rivers have created a massive delta of islands and waterways in the gaps between coastal dunes. After unusually severe spring tides devastated this region in 1953, the Dutch built an elaborate system of dikes, canals, dams, bridges, and locks to hold back the North Sea.

The Mayn River, seen here with what is thought to be a portion of the Anadyr River, flows through the far northeastern corner of Siberia.

Between the fertile Euphrates River valley and the cultivated lands of the eastern Mediterranean coast, the Syrian Desert covers parts of modern Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.

After beginning in northern British Columbia and flowing through the Yukon in Canada, the Yukon River crosses into Alaska in the USA, before emptying into the Bering Sea. Countless lakes, sloughs, and ponds are scattered throughout this scene of the river's delta.

Rico says the world is even more bizarre than we can imagine, yet Man still thinks he can fuck with it with impunity. While it may be the top of the ninth and Man, always a power hitter, has been pushing Nature hard, we need to remember, as Thomas Friedman quoted: Nature always bats last...