Our changing planet through the eyes of #Landsat 🌎 Since 1972, the NASA and USGS Landsat Program has brought us an unprecedented and nearly continuous visual record of Earth’s landscapes, icescapes, and coastal waters. Landsat satellites have collected more than 9 million scenes and provoked more than 18,000 research papers. This false-color Landsat 8 image, voted as a favorite by visitors to our Earth Observatory website, shows wetlands around the Mississippi Delta on Dec. 1, 2016. The colors emphasize the difference between land and water while allowing viewers to observe waterborne sediment, which is typically absent from false-color imagery. In a 2017 study, researchers analyzed roughly 10,000 Landsat satellite images of this area, taken between 1982 and 2016. They found that winds are responsible for the widespread growth of ponds in three watersheds along the Mississippi River. In effect, the study showed that wind-driven erosion, which nibbles away coastlines and the edges ...