The satellite imaging company DigitalGlobe recently declared the winner of their 2012 Top Image Contest. The winning top image was taken from above Burning Man. Click on the images to find out the locations of some of the other fantastic runners-up.

Brilliant Color Flows From Glacier
Credit: NASA
The Columbia Glacier descends from an ice field 10,000 feet (3,050 meters) above sea level, down the flanks of the Chugach Mountains, and into a narrow inlet that leads into Prince William Sound in southeastern Alaska. It is one of the most rapidly changing glaciers in the world.
This false-color image, captured by the Thematic Mapper (TM) instrument on Landsat 5, shows the glacier and the surrounding landscape on May 30, 2011. Snow and ice appears bright cyan, vegetation is green, clouds are white or light orange, and the open ocean is dark blue. Exposed bedrock is brown, while rocky debris on the glacier’s surface is gray.
tagged: exctinction gif biodiversity biology earth history natural history geography
![matthen:
Visualising extinctions over the past million 531 years. The size of the circle shows how the biodiversity of the earth differs from the long-term trend. The resulting fluctuations seem to repeat every 62 million years or so, with 5 main extinction events in total. The most recent was of course the end of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago. Does this mean the Earth is due another?! [This follows the analysis of an interesting nature article] [more] [code]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m42vf5KFA81qfg7o3o1_400.gif)
Visualising extinctions over the past million 531 years. The size of the circle shows how the biodiversity of the earth differs from the long-term trend. The resulting fluctuations seem to repeat every 62 million years or so, with 5 main extinction events in total. The most recent was of course the end of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago. Does this mean the Earth is due another?! [This follows the analysis of an interesting nature article] [more] [code]

It looks like it’s sinking. I bet it was one big island hundreds of thousands of years ago. Erosion and rising sea levels just whittled it down to these.

Colors of a Colorado Overnight (by Mike Berenson - Colorado Captures)

Small, blocky shapes of towns, fields, and pastures surround the graceful swirls and whorls of the Mississippi River. Countless oxbow lakes and cutoffs accompany the meandering river south of Memphis, Tennessee, on the border between Arkansas and Mississippi, USA. The ‘mighty Mississippi’ is the largest river system in North America. Image taken by Landsat 7 on May 28, 2003.

Madeira Island Sunrise (by Mr.Enjoy)
![ikenbot:
Glacier Flows in Iceland
by Erlend Haarberg
An aerial view showing small streams flowing at the Langj kull glacier in Iceland.
[As seen on DailyMail’s ‘Iceland from the air: Incredible aerial pictures show the majesty of the country’s volcanic landscapes’]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4by0hnqWH1qbn5m1o1_1280.jpg)





