What We See Teaches Something About our Planet…

and Ourselves

Earth is one of NASA’s prime areas of study.  The same goes for the European Space Agency and its satellites. Other countries also study Earth from space. What does this tell us? That our home planet is something we are seeking to understand from afar.  It makes sense. There are certain ways to study Earth that can’t be done from the surface. It helps to study the atmosphere from space, to see it as a “whole” instead of a “column” of air that we look at from the ground up.  The same goes for studies of the ocean and large-scale land features. It’s a systems approach that gives us the “Big Picture” of our home planet.

The picture below is from the International Space Station. It shows the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico caused by the catastrophic failure of a deep-sea oil well.  It took millions of years of geologic action to form (an oil reserve) beneath the ocean.  Humans want that oil, but in the process, are now destroying ecosystems and coastal areas that also took millions and billions of years to form. Think about that.