Scenes from a dying Earth?

A nice collection of NASA satellite imagery captured this month over at guardian.co.uk. Typical planet doom? -type material. Worth a look if you're in to that sort of thing!

The image shows the diversion of the Kosi River (India) into an unused channel, a result of heavy monsoon rain further upstream. Floods continue in the region.

Other images in the collection show

• 'concerning' cracks forming in the Petermann Glacier in Greenland, generally symbolic of the rapid, human-induced decline of the Arctic in recent years.

• large wildfires in southern Africa, which have resulted in at least 89 deaths.

• hurricane-affected regions of the Caribbean –Cuba and Haiti have been hit particularly hard several hurricanes. Galveston and the rest of SE Texas have also been heavily affected by Hurricane Ike (Cat 2 at US landfall; 4 in Cuba)).

Snapshots of a dying planet, or just run-of-the-mill climate varibility? These images show nothing definitive, no Cataclysms. Just more datapoints documenting a changing environment, driven by both natural and anthropogenic forces. Only time will tell (and that time may well be soon...).

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In other news, posting is likely to continue to be lite-N-fluffy here for the foreseeable future – lots of meatspace obligations and a touch of burnout. I haven't given up, though...just a bit of a break. The 'collection of found items' in the sidebar will continue to be updated regardless of the level of posting activity.