The Earth Story

Original caption:

Philae

The island of Philae was originally a nearly-permanent island within the Nile River in Egypt. In long, meandering rivers, islands occasionally form inside the rive from carried by the waters. These islands are long-lived but not truly permanent; the waters will split around them during normal flow, but during occasional hundred or thousand year floods the waters could cover an island and can erode or even destroy it.

This was the origin of the island Philae. It sat in the middle of the Nile River, surrounded by its waters on both sides. The island became the home of one of the Egyptian civilization’s most amazing temples, the Temple of Isis.

In the 1960s, the Aswan High Dam was built on the Nile River, creating Lake Nasser and providing energy and stable water flow to the nation of Egypt. The creation of this lake flooded much of the island of Philae. Some of the remnants of the temple were moved to higher ground before the construction of the dam. These photos reflect how it appears today, with some portion of the island flooded but some parts still in tact.

The island of Philae recently gave its name to the spacecraft built by the European Space Agency that dropped onto the surface of a comet from the Rosetta Spacecraft. The craft was named after the Rosetta stone that originally allowed translation between the ancient Egyptian Language and Greek. The island of Philae hosted an additional obelisk with the same setup –hosting Egyptian hieroglyphs and a translation into Greek.

The Rosetta spacecraft was named in the hopes that its data would allow humanity to translate some of the history of Earth as comets may have been part of the solar system soup combined together to form the planet we see today.

-JBB

Image credits: https://www.flickr.com/photos/travlr/3020366735 https://www.flickr.com/photos/rietje/3663566528

Read more: http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/10/21/naming-philae-an-interview-with-2004-contest-winner-serena-olga-vismara/ http://www.sacred-destinations.com/egypt/philae

Dust plume over Earth's youngest sea.

The Red sea, an arm of the Indian Ocean, is the youngest sea on Earth. A spreading ridge started pushing Africa and Arabia apart, and has spread down Africa as the continental rifts. Whether this will end up with a splitting of the entire continent, or the african rift will turn into a failed rift graben (called an aulacogen, consisting of downfaulted blocks with old volcanic rocks and lake sediments within) remains unknown.

With a length of over 2,000 Km, and a width of 355, the sea started to open in the Eocene about 30 million years ago, speeding up in the Oligocene. Hydrothermal vents are currently forming metal sulphide deposits in varied areas of its floor. In this image, taken from the ISS, a dust plume is being carried by winds from Africa towards Asia, bringing eroded sediment to rejoin their once-neighbours on the other side of this narrow budding ocean. The Nile river is visible in the upper left of the image.

Loz

Image credit: NASA http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=81566&src=fb

The Blue Nile Falls

Thirty kilometers downstream from its birthplace in Lake Tana, the fledgling Blue Nile drops over a basaltic cliff in a sheet of water a half mile wide, plunging 45 m in a plume of spray. The mist created by the Blue Nile Falls gives it its name in Amharic: Tis Isat, or smoking water.

This picture was taken in 2013, but when I was in Ethiopia for fieldwork this past October (usually the best time to see the falls as the rainy season has just ended), we were told that it was hardly worth visiting. Drought through the summer and fall had sapped its strength, already artificially lowered by a hydroelectric station built in 2003. It's yet another symptom of this year's powerful El Niño, which has changed the typical monsoonal rain patterns in Ethiopia and raised food insecurity to desperate levels after failed harvests. (For more on El Niño, see previous posts: http://on.fb.me/1P1BV2O) Beyond the effects on agriculture and livestock, El Niño's weather anomalies endanger Ethiopia's tourism and power infrastructures as well; hydropower accounts for nearly 100% of Ethiopia's electricity. -CEL

Sources: http://bit.ly/1omL7s7 http://nbcnews.to/1T9IHts Image: Saskia Keesstra (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

THE NILE AT NIGHT

The Nile River and its Delta provide a home for about 97 percent of Egypt’s population, even though the river and delta form less than 5 percent of the country’s land area. This image, taken on October 13, 2012 by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite shows a nighttime view. The VIIRS captured this image using its “day-night band”; this detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared. It uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as gas flares, auroras, wildfires, city lights, and reflected moonlight.

Lights are abundant along the full length of the river, though the brightest lights are around Cairo. Away from the lights, the land and water appear black. As the image was acquired near the time of the new Moon, very little moonlight was available to brighten the land and water surfaces.

-TEL

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=79807 Image: Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using VIIRS Day-Night Band data from the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership.

Philae The island of Philae was originally a nearly-permanent island within the Nile River in Egypt. In long, meandering rivers, islands occasionally form inside the rive from carried by the waters. These islands are long-lived but not truly permanent; the waters will split around them during normal flow, but during occasional hundred or thousand year floods the waters could cover an island and can erode or even destroy it. This was the origin of the island Philae. It sat in the middle of the Nile River, surrounded by its waters on both sides. The island became the home of one of the Egyptian civilization’s most amazing temples, the Temple of Isis.  In the 1960s, the Aswan High Dam was built on the Nile River, creating Lake Nasser and providing energy and stable water flow to the nation of Egypt. The creation of this lake flooded much of the island of Philae. Some of the remnants of the temple were moved to higher ground before the construction of the dam. These photos reflect how it appears today, with some portion of the island flooded but some parts still in tact. The island of Philae recently gave its name to the spacecraft built by the European Space Agency that dropped onto the surface of a comet from the Rosetta Spacecraft. The craft was named after the Rosetta stone that originally allowed translation between the ancient Egyptian Language and Greek. The island of Philae hosted an additional obelisk with the same setup –hosting Egyptian hieroglyphs and a translation into Greek. The Rosetta spacecraft was named in the hopes that its data would allow humanity to translate some of the history of Earth as comets may have been part of the solar system soup combined together to form the planet we see today.  The Philae spacecraft was named in 2004, when it was launched, by a 15-year-old Italian Student named Serena Olga Vismara. Today, she is in graduate school, about to finish a Masters Degree in space engineering. -JBB Image credits: https://www.flickr.com/photos/travlr/3020366735 https://www.flickr.com/photos/rietje/3663566528 Read more: http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/10/21/naming-philae-an-interview-with-2004-contest-winner-serena-olga-vismara/ http://www.sacred-destinations.com/egypt/philae