Incredible satellite photos from some of earths most visually stunning areas, thanks to Environmental Graffiti who brought these NASA images to light again recently. The images were selected from a exhibition the Library of Congress held in 2000, in which the 400,000 images taken by NASA’s Landsat 7 satellite were sorted through to find the most beautiful.

A small corner of the vast Great Sandy Desert that does have large sand dunes – the only sand in this desert of scrub and rock – the dunes are here visible as lines stretching across the image. The light-coloured fan shapes are scars from wildfires.

A field of glaciers and enormous icebergs surround the freezing waters of Baffin Bay, bounded to the south and west by the Inuit islands of Baffin and Ellesmere. The bay lies 300 m (1000 ft) above the level of the massive Greenlandic ice cap, depressed by its own weight, and is home to a large number of Beluga whales that survive on the multitudes of small fish and crustaceans in its waters.

One of Canada’s most amazing arctic islands, it is ringed with steep limestone cliffs that rise high above sea level and its central plateau. Unsurprisingly, it is only accessible only by air, which is pretty ideal for its cliff nesting seabirds called Akpatoks (or Thick-billed Murres as we know them).

The Aleutian islands are an archipelago of over three hundred islands. They lie on the westernmost point of the united states on the pacific ring of fire. Once belonging to Russia, they were purchased along with Alaska by the Americans.

The color differences you see in this photo are probably due to the different temperatures of the water droplets.

From afar, this could look like an abstract painting, however this spectacular satellite image is of the dunes of sand and seaweed, sculpted by the ocean currents. The fluted, underwater dunes are formed in much the same way as sand dunes in deserts.

This image of the once vast carpet of rainforest in the Amazon basin is reminiscent of the cubist masters. Fanning out from the large blocks of land cleared by ranchers and loggers radiate arrangements of fields and farms, the remaining healthy vegetation appearing in bright red.

After flowing past the ancient city of Kolkata the sacred Ganges empties into the Bay of Bengal amidst the labyrinth of swamps and waterways that make up its expansive delta. In the surrounding forest live an array of rare and wonderful animals including the Bengal tiger and Indian python.

Pillboxes and gun emplacements litter a former wetland, drained and now used as a staging area for military exercises just north of war-torn Basra. The settlement lay at the heart of the ancient Sumerian civilization and was the first city built after the emigration of Mohammad and his followers to the city of Medina in 622 A.D. – the year that marks the start of the Islamic calendar.

The rivers of this small country in West Africa, once known for its main economic activity – the slave trade – wash into the Atlantic Ocean, creating complex patterns of swirling silt below the surface of the shallow water.

The Lena River is the tenth longest river in the world and its delta is the largest area of protected wilderness in Russia. Desolate frozen tundra for most of the year, every May the region is transformed into a lush wetland that becomes home to several species of rare Siberian wildlife for several months. The striking blue expanse above the coral-like delta is the freezing waters of the Arctic Ocean.

Several glaciers spill onto the Gulf of Alaska to form the gentle ripples of the Malaspina, an ice field so large it can only be seen in its entirety from space. Its tongue, here shown in sky blue, flows from the stunning Saint Elias Mountains towards the sea, filling the plain, although at no point does it actually reach the icy water.

This extensive delta at the mouth of Volga is comprised of more than 500 channels and sustains the most productive fishing grounds in Eurasia. The delicate vein-like waterways flow into the dark expanses of the Caspian Sea, the largest body of enclosed water on the planet.

All images from NASA

Quoted text from 30 Most Incredible Abstract Satellite Images of Earth