Earth Matters

A Big Thank You To Our 100,000 Facebook Fans

January 12th, 2013 by Adam Voiland

On March 11, 2009, we posted our first image on Facebook, a spectacular view of ash billowing from Mount Etna (below). At the time, we had just a handful of friends on Facebook, and just a few of them shared it with theirs.

Fast forward three years…and tens of thousands of you have joined our Facebook community. We routinely receive dozens of comments and hundreds of you share nearly every image we post. On January 12, 2013, thanks to all of you, we hit a milestone we’ve been eying for months: 100,000 fans. The friends of these 100,000 fans, Facebook tells us, number over 34 million.

That’s an extraordinary number, but what’s even more notable is how much we’ve learned from all of you since that first post. You’ve told us what you like, what you don’t, and why. You’ve given us countless story ideas, and you have pushed us to keep digging and learning about images long after we hit the publish button. You’ve taught us—and each other—more than we could have imagined when we posted that first image.

So from all of us at the Earth Observatory, THANK YOU! To mark the occasion, we’ve pulled together (above) a few of our favorite craters, plus an atoll in French Polynesia that’s conveniently shaped like a 1. The craters include Pingualuit and Manicouagan in Canada, Lonar in India, Tenoumer in Mauritania, and Crater Lake in the United States. We’ll leave it to you to figure out which is which.

In the meantime, please keep your feedback coming. We love hearing from you, and it helps make our site better. And one last plea: please share this post with your friends, tell them to join our Facebook page, and let them know that we’d love to hear from them as well.