ISS016-E-31056
Water (black) fills the bottom of the pit and several other basins in the surrounding area. The city of Cananea, marked by its street grid, is northeast of the mine workings. A leachate reservoir for removal and evaporation of water pumped from the mine workings is located to the east of the mine (image lower left). The bluish-white color of deposits near the reservoir suggests the high mineral content of the leachate.
Copper and gold ores at Cananea are found in a porphyry copper deposit, a geological structure formed by crystal-rich magma moving upwards through pre-existing rock layers. A porphyry—an igneous rock with large crystals in a fine-grained matrix—forms as the magma cools and crystallizes. While crystallization is occurring, hot fluids can circulate through the magma and surrounding rocks via fractures. This hydrothermal alteration of the rocks typically forms copper-bearing and other minerals. Much of the Cananea mine’s ore is concentrated in breccia pipes—mineralized rod- or chimney-shaped bodies that contain broken rock fragments.
The mine workings at Cananea are significant in the recent history of Mexico, as poor working conditions there in 1906 led to a miner’s strike that resulted in 19 deaths. That event is generally considered to be a major catalyst of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, as well as the beginning of Mexico’s labor movement. Current environmental and economic conditions at the mine led to a worker strike that halted mine operations in 2007.
ISS016-E-27586
Images of city lights at night taken by astronauts are among the most interesting visual reminders of how humans have transformed Earth’s surface. This nighttime photograph of Tokyo, Japan, was taken by International Space Station astronaut Dan Tani on February 5, 2008. The heart of the city is brightest, with ribbons of lights radiating outward from the center along streets and railways. The regularly spaced bright spots along one of the ribbons heading almost due west out of the downtown area are probably train stations along a public transit route. The lights of Tokyo are a cooler blue-green color than many other world cities. The color results from the more widespread use of mercury vapor lighting as opposed to sodium vapor lighting, which produces an orange-yellow light.
ISS016-E-31086
The permeable, highly fractured basalt of Culiacan is an important component of the local hydrology. Precipitation that falls on the slopes of the hill swiftly infiltrates the sediments of the valley floor, providing sufficient moisture to support agriculture (green and brown fields at image center) and, in turn, several small cities such as Jaral del Progreso and El Capulin de la Trinidad (light gray regions with street grids). Precipitation has also incised the slopes of Cerro Culiacan with a radial drainage pattern, extending outwards from the peak in all directions much like the spokes of a bicycle wheel.
ISS016-E-30080
The mountain (image center) appears light gray, with brown concentric banding. Slieve Elva (lower left) is capped with younger dark brown shale, and it has a border of dark green vegetation; at 345 meters above sea level (1,132 feet), it is the highest point on the plateau. The rounded character of limestone hills and intervening valleys of Gleninagh Mountain comes not only from the erosion of the limestone by water, but also from the scouring of loose material by past glaciers.
Most karst occurs in limestones or dolostones, rocks made primarily from the minerals calcite or dolomite. Groundwater and surface water moves through fractures in the rock, dissolving it over time, forming voids and channels. As the voids grow and connect, the rock dissolves even more; when the rock below can no longer support the overlying rock and soil, collapse features like sinkholes form. Over time, the collapses can turn an originally flat landscape into one with significant topography.
A very thin cloud cover is visible over Gleninagh Mountain. Despite the barren appearance of this portion of the Burren Plateau, thin soils are present and the area is used for grazing cattle during the winter. Numerous small springs —another hallmark of karst terrain: surface streams tend to disappear underground via fractures—provide water for both cattle and human use in this otherwise dry landscape.
ISS016-E-30127
This detailed image (width covers a distance of 14.5 kilometers, or about 9 miles) shows the winding Moselle River flowing north (left to right). The river has cut a gorge more than 300 meters (984 feet) deep into a relatively flat plateau. The plateau is covered mainly in dark green forests, with some large agricultural fields. Because this is one of the coolest places in Europe where grape vines grow, the warmer microclimates that occur in the valleys below the exposed and higher plateau are key to growing vines.
Within the narrow and very steep valley, those slopes which face south and west are best for grapes. The north-facing slopes not only receive less direct sunshine, but the deep shadows of the canyon walls fall on them sooner in the day. These shadows are visible on the canyon wall opposite Kroev and elsewhere, where they make the river difficult to see. The vine-covered slopes, with very small plot sizes, appear as light grays and light greens along most of the gorge slopes. In this view, slopes around the villages of Kroev, Kuess, and Maring enjoy the best south-facing aspect.
Available sunlight is so limited here that even the reflected light from the river surface is known to help the vines, an effect that also favors south-facing slopes. The landscape character has also affected wine prices. Less-favorable slopes have been planted with hardier grapes of lower quality. This in turn has sometimes reduced prices somewhat for all Moselle wines.
Many slopes are so steep that the grapes cannot be harvested mechanically, which makes these vines very labor intensive and potentially hazardous for workers. The village of Bremm just outside the picture at top right, has the steepest documented vineyard in the world, with vines growing on a 65-degree slope.
ISS016-E-10312
In September 1620, English Separatists, also called the Pilgrims, left Europe to set up a colony near the mouth of the Hudson River. On November 20, they sighted land and confirmed it to be Cape Cod. This arm-shaped peninsula of Massachusetts is shown here in 2007 in a digital photograph from astronauts aboard the International Space Station.
The Pilgrims initially decided to sail farther south, but quickly became wary of the shallow waters and shoals east and south of Cape Cod and Nantucket—waters full of the sandy, rocky outwash from ancient glaciers. They sailed around the northeastern tip of the Cape and on November 21, 1620, dropped anchor just off the shores of modern-day Provincetown. While resting in that harbor, they composed and signed the Mayflower Compact, an agreement to establish self-government.
In the weeks that followed, the Pilgrims explored the Cape and made their first encounter with the Wampanoag Indians, native people whose ancestors may have explored and inhabited Cape Cod as early as 11,000 years ago. Eventually, the Pilgrims made their way to the western shores of Cape Cod Bay, landing near an abandoned Wampanoag settlement known as Patuxet.
Plymouth Rock—which is likely a creation of oral history and legend, since there is no mention of it in the writings of the original Mayflower voyagers—is a glacial erratic, a large boulder that dropped out of a glacier.
The Cape’s sandy peninsula and a fair bit of southeastern Massachusetts is, in a way, also a migrant. The area was both built up and scoured by the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which stretched down past Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket during Earth’s last major Ice Age. In their advance and retreat, the glaciers composing the ice sheet scraped rock off of Earth’s surface, eventually depositing it on Cape Cod. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the deposits are 200 to 600 feet thick across the region.
Though this photo cannot show all the rocks left behind, it does show the dozens of kettle hole ponds. As the ice sheet retreated, sediments washing out of the glaciers occasionally covered chunks of ice. Those ice blocks would eventually melt and collapse the sediments, creating the space for the fresh groundwater-fed ponds we see today.
Editor’s Note: On the original Mayflower Compact, the date is listed as November 11. When Western societies switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, 10 days were added, turning November 11 into November 21.
