Mystery Image -- September 2, 2007
 

Lake Chad and the Bodele Depression

Mystery Image -- August 26, 2007
Congratulations to Seb de G. from the United Kingdom for identifying this photo!  Seb won a free t shirt of his choice from Laughing Dragon.  Here's what he wrote:

The picture is of dust plumes over the Bodele Depression in Chad, Central Africa, which have been shown to fertilize the Amazon Rainforest. In 2006 it was estimated that more than half of the dust needed to fertilize the Amazon Rainforest is provided by the Bodele Depression.

The green patch on the bottom left is Lake Chad, which is shrinking. In the 1960's, Lake Chad covered an area of 26,000km?, but by 2000 its extent had fallen to less than 1,500km?. The massive shrinking is attributed to reduced rainfall combined with greatly increased amounts of irrigation water being drawn from the lake and the rivers which feed it, which provide water to some 20 million people.

It seems highly likely that the lake will continue to shrink, and may very well disappear altogether by the end of the 21st century. The droughts and higher temperatures in the region have been attributed by some to global warming. A notable reference was made by Al Gore in his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

Laika the Space Dog from Sputnik 2
 

Pale Blue Dot Photo By Voyager 1

Mystery Image -- May 2, 2007
Congratulations to Steve W. from San Fransisco for identifying this photo!  Steve won a free t shirt of his choice from Laughing Dragon.  Here's what he wrote:


This is the famous "Pale Blue Dot" photo taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on February 14, 1990. The little speck inside the blue circle is the planet earth, as seen from the outskirts of our solar system some 4 billion miles away. Carl Sagan later summed it up beautifully with these words:

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you know, everyone you love, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines. Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

" To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish this pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Saturn Hurricane Photo By Cassini