A beautiful image marks a milestone — and illuminates the astonishing extent of our species’ impact
Yesterday will mostly be remembered as a momentous day in American politics. But it also happened to be an important milestone in human spaceflight (and, arguably, our evolution as a spacefaring species): As of Nov. 2, 2010, astronauts have lived and worked in space continuously — aboard the International Space Station — for an entire decade.
To mark the occasion, NASA released this stunning picture taken through a window of the ISS as the station was passing over the Gulf coast of the United States. (Click on the image to go to the NASA image gallery, where you can see it blown up even larger.)
In the image, New Orleans is the bright splotch just above the solar panel of the Soyuz spacecraft, which is docked to the station. The dark spot to the left (north) of the city, is Lake Ponchartrain. And the Alabama coast extends beyond New Orleans, up and to the left a bit. (Note: NASA’s caption incorrectly identifies New Orleans as Mobile, Alabama, which is actually above The Crescent City on the Gulf Coast in this image.)
The glowing ribbon of light extending toward the upper right from New Orleans actually is Louisiana’s Route 23, which protrudes into the Delta along the Mississippi River. And Houston is the bright patch that’s partially obscured by an instrument sticking out from the Soyuz spacecraft. The coast extends behind the spacecraft, and then curves around into Mexico, where some city lights are visible at the limb of the Earth (bottom of the picture).
I’m really struck by three things in this image.
The first is the numerous pinpoints of light out in the Gulf of Mexico (to the right in the image, before the grayish/blueish cloud bank). Are these the lights of oil platforms in the Gulf? I’m not positive, but I think so. (What else could they be?)
I’m also struck by the band of warmish color that extends around the limb of the Earth. Is this the atmosphere lit up by fading sunlight or maybe even the glowing lights of cities below? Again, I’m not sure, but I think this is a very good bet.
If I’m correct, that thin band highlights something that many people still have a hard time believing: the fact that we puny human beings are actually capable of altering the composition of the atmosphere so profoundly that we can influence one of our planet’s life support systems: the Earth’s themostat. (I’m speaking, of course, of the carbon cycle, which controls the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.)
From this perspective, the atmosphere doesn’t seem quite so thick — and perhaps not quite so resistant to our influence — as it does when we simply look straight up from the ground.
Perhaps most striking, at least aesthetically, is our footprint on the land. It is revealed not only by the large cities but also the necklaces of glimmering highways that connect them. It takes fossil fuels to keep all of this alight, and it is by burning those fuels that we affect the composition of that brownish band.
It’s true that we’ve seen Earth-at-night images before. But there is something about this one that is particularly arresting, at least for me. And most important is this: It’s one thing to read in a scientific paper that human activity has transformed up to 50 percent of the Earth’s surface. It’s another thing entirely to actually see that number lit up in such a dazzling way.
This thing has 9 Comments
I remember seeing a scale diagram of low-earth orbit an thinking “that’s very low and very close.” Orbit is closer to me that Portland to Seattle. At the lowest bound it’s a mere 2.5% of the the Earth’s radius (160km orbit vs. a 6370km radius), much less than the difference between a yardstick and a meterstick to scale.
However, the perception belies the true scale. You are looking at two massive things with small relative differences and perceiving small absolute sizes. Mt Everest extends up 5.5% of distance to orbit, and only .14% of the Earth’s diameter (.5mm if the Earth were a regulation basketball). On this “comparison of large things” scale, Everest is vanishing small — the atmosphere, well “it’s wafer thin.”
Humans have had impact on our planet and have a responsibility to care for it to be sure. Our impact is still far less (by orders or magnitude) than what nature can and *will* do (the next glacial period, the next Toba event, the next “dinosaur killer”). Perspective for assessing risk is important and human frontal lobes are bad at this scale.
John: Wow, this is terrific! And thank you for investing so much effort in adding some value to my post. I really appreciate it.
As for your point about what nature can and will do, this is undeniably true. But we humans probably can’t do anything about the next Toba event — or, closer to home, an explosion of the Yellowstone caldera. But we most definitely CAN do something about our own impact on the life support systems of the planet.
The real but exceedingly low probability of a civilization-ending eruption does not diminish in any way the much greater chances that we will cause significant problems for ourselves, including sea level rise. These issues may not be a cataclysmic from a planetary perspective, but they could be very problematic for civilization.
Tom, the image seems to be very high-res, including on the front page, which makes for very slow loading.
John will doubtless be shocked when he finds out that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is already much higher than needed to block any resumption of glaciation.
When the image first started to appear i thought you were going to do a piece on this image.
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/tiff/PIA13570.tif
Really quite stunning on its own, in terms of transportation of materials around the solar system.
Spyder: Fabulous! Which comet is it?
Steve: I’ll take care of the image resolution issue in just a bit. I didn’t take it into Photoshop. I just grabbed the full resolution image from NASA. A mistake, I gather.
@Steve: re — glaciation, first I’m curious as to your source, second if true, then AGW is a very, very, good thing. I’ll trade 20m of sea level rise for 2km of ice anytime. While it would be expense and difficult to mitigate (mostly by migration) the worst case sea level rise, it’s *way* simpler than melting a glacier.
@Tom: Certainly we have to care for our world. We just disagree as to priorities and risks. Fair enough?
John, it must be nice to live in a world where you can be so confident that physical reality will arrange itself conveniently for humans, with SLR stopping neatly at 20 meters even though the 500+ ppm CO2 levels that are now pretty much inevitable are enough to melt all of the ice. (The Copenhagen Diagnosis is a good place for more on this.) Then there’s ocean acidification (models wrong yet again — see Tom’s recent post), drought overtaking many of the world’s most productive agricultural areas, increasingly severe storms, etc., etc., etc. Nope, no problem.
@Steve: 1st — I’m still curious as to the source of the “AGW will prevent the next glacial period” claim. There’s still that big yellow thing in the sky, and if it decides to go a bit quieter… 2nd — I’m curious as to the source of the claim that current CO2 level and projections are enough to melt all of the non-floating ice (and as to the timeframe). The most recent information I’ve read is that just Greenland melting (7m) is a multimillenial process, even with worst case temperature rise. Also how many additional doublings of CO2 do you expect with non-renewables eventually running out?
In any case, I’d trade 200m SLR over even a single millenia vs. multiple millenia of 2km ice. You must own a really large snowblower if you don’t thing so…
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As for most of your list of potential disasters, there isn’t good peer reviewed concensus. Many of the most extreme claims come from the advocacy literature (and are self contradictory (i.e. mores storm vs. fewer storms, no more cold winters vs. more extreme winters).
I highly recommend Dr. Pielke Jr. website http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/ where you can find in his archived articles critiques, and re-examination of a large number of these claims.
John and Steve: The last time you guys went at it — and please understand that I respect you both! — the tit for tat went on for quite some time. Let’s have at it for a bit more but then move on. Fair enough? (I’m sure I’ll soon be writing another provocative piece that you can can come to rhetorical blows over!)
BTW: This post did have a bit of a message, but mostly it was meant to feature an awe-inspiring image. So be inspired!