Mexico’s largest coastal lagoon supports an array of vegetation and marine life.
Published Sep 4, 2017
Acquired September 18, 2009, this true-color image of Laguna Ojo de Liebre on Baja California shows the margins of industrialized salt works in the east and a famed marine mammal wintering site in the west.
Published Sep 27, 2009
The waters that once protected Venice now threaten it. A complex engineering project is being installed to beat back the tide.
Published Mar 25, 2014
This ISS photograph captures two great lagoons to the north and south of Kaliningrad, Russia: Vistula Lagoon and Kurshsky Bay.
Published Aug 22, 2011
The waters around this Italian city provide a study in how humans affect the seas and how the seas affect human settlement.
Published Jun 2, 2014
Speckled with blue and white icebergs, the Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon is a stunning landscape, but also a relatively new one.
Published Dec 12, 2019
This lagoon along the Brazil-Uruguay border formed when sea level was much higher, and has since evolved from a marine to freshwater lake.
Published Jan 16, 2017
In the last three decades, Egypt has greatly modified a series of lagoons and lakes along the northeast coast of the Nile Delta for the production of fish. Partial sunglint in this astronaut photograph reveals numerous details in one such fishery. Sunglint is light reflected directly back from a surface—usually water—to the viewer (or to a camera or satellite sensor). Waves generated by northwesterly winds (lower left to upper right in this view) have created the frond-like sand spit along the coast (image top). Faint sea swells are visible at image upper left as a pattern of dark and light lines. Dark patches in the center of the image are shadows cast by small clouds, which appear pewter-gray compared to the golden sunglint on the watery surfaces below.
Published Oct 30, 2006
Sand spits and other wind- and wave-built patterns distinguish the south coast of Brazil.
Published May 2, 2016
In these images captured by International Space Station astronauts on August 27, 2006, bright sunlight glinting off the western Caribbean Sea reveals intersecting wave patterns and oily surfactants on the surface waters around Bajo Nuevo Reef. Bajo Nuevo is a collection of small islets arranged into two U-shaped cays, low islands made of coral or sand. This pair of images shows the easternmost of the two cays (also known as “keys”) and surrounding waters.
Published Oct 2, 2006
An annual summertime bloom of cyanobacteria flourished in such numbers as to be visible from space.
Published Aug 23, 2015
The islands of this tourist mecca are actually the rim of an old volcano.
Published Oct 17, 2016
These two images of the Tuamotu Archipelago, French Polynesia, illustrate diversity in the morphology of atolls, one of the major types of coral reef formations. A typical atoll structure is a lagoon surrounded by a closed rim of cays and shallow spillways that control the exchange of water between the ocean and the lagoon. However, like human beings, this general scheme may vary according to the history of each individual atoll, resulting in a high diversity of morphology, especially for small atolls. The two neighboring atolls shown here have some unique features. What was a lagoon on Nukutavake (19°17′ S 138°48′ W, 6.2 km²) is now dry and completely covered by vegetation. Pinaki (3.54 km²) has a drying shallow lagoon still connected to the ocean via a single narrow spillway. The variation of morphology implies that each atoll may have a different equilibrium between ocean, lagoon, and land ecosystems.
Published Jul 1, 2001
One of the larger islands in the remote Cook Island chain of the Central Pacific has the classic features of a coral atoll.
Published Nov 9, 2015
