In my last post I talked about how knowing the science behind a picture makes it better. I still say that's true, but also, sometimes, the beauty and awe of a picture can speak for itself. Behold, swirls of sea ice off the coast of Greenland:
Breathtaking, isn't it? [Click to phasechangenate.] This was taken by NASA's Aqua satellite on October 16, 2012. Aqua is designed to observe Earth's water cycle: the oceans, evaporation, clouds, precipitation, snow cover, and, obviously, sea ice. It takes a vast amount of energy to move water from the ocean into the atmosphere and then move it around the planet, energy which comes from sunlight and steered by the Earth's spin. Observations like those of Aqua show us how the constituents of the atmosphere change how that transport occurs, how that energy is stored, and how we humans affect that with our grand experiment of ...
