Landscape Gallery

Us-Satellite Image-Great Barier Reef

This image taken from NASA's Earth Obeservatory Internet site shows the Great Barrier Reef, that extends for 1, 242 miles (2, 000 km) along the northeastern coast of Australia. It is not a single reef, but a vast maze of reefs, passages, and coral cays (islands that are part of the reef). This true-color image was acquired by the Multi-angle Imaging Spectroradiometer (MISR) instrument on August 26, 2000, and shows part of the southern portion of the reef adjacent to the central Queensland coast. The width of the MISR swath is approximately 236 miles (380 kilometers), with the reef clearly visible up to approximately 124 miles (200 kilometers) from the coast. The large island off the most northerly part of the coast visible in this image is Whitsunday Island, with smaller islands and reefs extending southeast, parallel to the coast. AFP PHOTO/ NASA / AFP PHOTO / NASA / NASA

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Sudan-Archaeology

A picture shows a pyramid in the Meroe desert, north of Khartoum, on February 26, 2010. But archaeologists say the desert of north Sudan holds mysteries to rival ancient Egypt. The Louvre will host its first exhibition at the end of March on the Meroe dynasty, the last in a line of "black pharaohs" that ruled the Kush kingdom on the banks of the Nile for more than 1, 000 years until its demise in 350 AD. AFP PHOTO/ASHRAF SHAZLY / AFP PHOTO / ASHRAF SHAZLY

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The ice cap in Africas highest mountain, Mt. Kilimanjaro gleams on December 13, 2009

The ice cap in Africa's highest mountain, Mt. Kilimanjaro gleams on December 13, 2009. According to a recent study by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) the ice sheet that capped Kilimanjaro in 2007 was 85 percent smaller than the one that covered its plateau in 1912. The mountain's ice cover shrank about 1 percent a year from 1912 to 1953, a rate that has accelerated in recent years. From 1989 to 2007, that rate jumped to 2.5 percent a year. Since 2000, the plateau's three remaining ice fields have shrunk by 26 percent, scientists found. If current conditions persist, climate change experts say, Kilimanjaro's world-renowned glaciers, which have covered Africa's highest peak for centuries, will be gone within the next two decades. World leaders struggled to nail down a climate pact Friday in Copenhagen, amid dismay and alarm among nations most at risk from global warming. A draft of a pact contained a call to prevent a rise in global temperatures of more than 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with pre-industrial times, the figure fell way short of the demands of threatened island nations. AFP PHOTO/ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP PHOTO / ROBERTO SCHMIDT

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