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At the time this image was acquired, the fires had finally been brought under control, but ash and smoke remained trapped in the atmosphere above the valley, a bowl of land ringed by the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the east (left) and the Coast Range Mountains to the west (right). The band of clouds at the bottom of the image is at an altitude above the mountains. The amber color in the sunglint over the Pacific coastal waters (right) also indicates the presence of smoke. At the top center of the image, the Mojave Desert comes to a point at the southern end of the Central Valley.
This image is part of a series of images of the California fires taken by the ISS crew. Just a week earlier, the astronauts observed and documented the California fires at their worst.
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But Lake Teletskoye is more than a large, deep lake. It is located within the 9,000 km2 Altaisky Zapovednik nature reserve, which helps protect its unspoiled waters. The main flow into the lake is the Tchulyshman River, but approximately 70 rivers and hundreds of seasonal streams also flow into the lake. The lake water drains and ultimately flows north to become one of Siberia’s great rivers, the Ob. Surrounding the lake are ancient taiga forests. Large lakes such as Teletskoye serve as repositories of regional paleoclimate data including sediment records and atmospheric pollutants. Teletskoye is included as one of Russia’s long-term ecological monitoring sites.
