The tour from space now goes international, as in the next six pages we will look at scenes from five different continents to get a feel for the diversity of landscapes worldwide. On this page, Landsat images of parts of Canada will be examined.
The many Landsat images spread over the next 6 pages that comprise Part 2 of this Section have mostly been selected from the master set used in developing the 1976 NASA publication Mission to Planet Earth: Landsat Views the World, using imagery acquired by Landsat 1. Scenes made by other earth-observing satellites and as photos on the ground are also used in this excursion The description associated with each Landsat image is extracted from the captions in that book; consult it, NASA SP-360 (residing in many libraries), for more extensive descriptions of the scenes reproduced in the following Tutorial pages. Recall, too, that you have already seen a number of foreign images, e.g., specifically, London, Paris, Florence, Peking, Tokyo and other cities on page 4-4 and the Game preceding this page in this Section.
Our trip to view examples of the Rest of the World begins in Canada. Canada is the third largest - areawise - country on Earth, although its population is around 40,000,000. Here is a mosaic of Canada, made by Earthsat from Landsat images, and below it a map of this country with its principal cities (note: Canada has Provinces, not States):
In appraising the landscape of Canada, a very important factor is that much of the country's surface developed on what is known as the Canadian Shield. This is a complex of Precambrian igneous and metamorphic rocks, shown in red in the map below. (Most of the shield terrain is relatively flat [some low hills in places], in part because the entire shield was subjected to extensive continental glaciation.)
We'll begin our Canadian tour with Newfoundland. A popular attraction on its north coast is L'Anse aux Meadows, now considered to be the first place in North America visited by Europeans. The Vikings landed there and stayed for a while, building sod-covered dwellings to protect from the harsh winter. Carbon-dating of fire embers places this around 1000 A.D., thus preceding Columbus by almost 500 years. Here is an ASTER view of the area, at the northern tip of Newfoundland, and a ground photo:
Labrador is one of the premium regions in Canada to see the styles of deformation in ancient (Precambrian) terrains. These next three images show 1) another space image in which the black and white rendition brings out fractures and other structures, 2) an oblique aerial view of the bleak scenery, and 3) a detailed aerial photo showing style of folding.
In eastern Canada, Nova Scotia is a Province in the Maritimes. This image shows the Cape Breton Island (this becomes an "island" because the narrow Strait of Canto cuts across its southern boundary), and other parts of northern Nova Scotia and the tip of Prince Edward Island.
Cape Breton boasts of the most rugged coastal scenery in the accessible eastern part of the North American continent. Its Cabot Trail is famed for its scenery.
Between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick is the great indentation known as the Bay of Fundy. The Bay is noted for its extremes in water level fluctuations. The Bay of Fundy has the largest variations in tide levels in the world - as great as 17 m (56 ft), resulting from the tidal bore effect caused by the tapering and shallowing of the Bay floor. Timing of the tides could contribute by helping the in and out surging waters to "resonate". This pair of Terra ASTER images shows the tidal extremes around Cobequit Bay in the Minas Basin:
Moving northward into an area where eastern Quebec meets the western boundary of the Labrador subprovince of Newfoundland, we see next a segment of the Canadian Shield. This is the Labrador Fold Belt, made up of tightly folded sedimentary rocks wedged between two granite complexes. The structures represent an ancient (Precambrian) tectonic zone formed when one irregular continental mass collided with a sedimentary basin; the entire region has been much eroded to form "roots of mountains". The present surface is strongly glaciated, leaving low hills and lakes and a paucity of trees so that rock exposures are widespread. The high northern latitudes favor an arctic-like vegetation assemblage called tundra. This inhospitable landscape is very sparsely populated, with a few small towns built near iron mines.
Less well traveled by tourists, but still replete with interesting places, is the Gaspe Peninsula, south of the St. Lawrence River:
The next scene covers some of the Eastern Townships in heavily forested (spruce; fir; pine; tamarack; birch; maple) hills in the Laurentian Lowlands of the Province of Quebec. The St. Lawrence River appears in the upper left and glacially-elongated lakes are scattered throughout the scene. The most striking feature throughout the image is a distinctive pattern of land-clearing by deforestation that stands out as elongate bars with jagged edges. Their lighter red color shows them to be grasslands. These long strips tend to be perpendicular to roads and small streams. They are a land use pattern brought over from France and adopted by the early French settlers (seigneurs) who colonized this region in the 1600s; the Cajuns around New Orleans used this style.
The capital of the Province of Quebec is Quebec City, one of the oldest settlements in North America, founded by the Frenchman Samuel de Champlain in 1609. It was here that the battle of the Plains of Abraham in the Seven Years War in 1759 that the British General Wolfe defeated the French General Montcalm (although both were killed during the conflict), which led to France ceding Canada to England in 1763. We see the city in a SPOT image and in a ground photo which shows the bluffs along the St. Lawrence River and the Chateau de Frontenac, a plush hotel that is part of the Canadian Pacific rail system.
Most of Canada's cities lie in regions near the U.S-Canadian border. Here is a Landsat image that shows Montreal, Canada's second largest city, and its surroundings. Note the elongated farms which follow the "long lot" style characteristic of France (and seen again around New Orleans).
This SPOT-4 panchromatic image shows much of the central part of Montreal. And here is this city as seen from the ground: Here is a Landsat 7 image of the western half of Canada's capital city, Ottawa: The broad expanse of reds are the government experimental farms located well within the city. The largest city in Canada is Toronto, at the northwest end of Lake Ontario. Here are two views of the city from space:
Courtesy: Carolina Map Distributors
The Quickbird satellite has produced this high resolution of downtown Toronto's tall buildings:
Compare this scene with the ground photo showing Toronto's skyline. The tall needlelike structure on the left is the CN Tower, the city's best known landmark.
Winter still remains in this March scene in the Province of Manitoba just north of North Dakota. Dominating the scene is Winnipeg, appearing black against the light snow because of snow removal and melting in that large city. In the countryside, dark lines (cleared farm roads) block out squares that are one-mile sections (part of the Township-Range system of surveying) similar to those so prevalent in the Great Plains (the lowlands here are an extension of that physiographic unit into Canada). Lakes Manitoba (left-center edge) and Winnipeg (top center) are remnants of a once larger lake system that covered wide areas of the plains at the end of the Pleistocene ice age. The dark areas that extend over the right third of the scene are the western edge of the Precambrian Canadian Shield. Pine and spruce are the prevalent trees in this part of the Shield.
Winnipeg looks less foreboding in summer, as evident in this image which brings out the city's location within extensive farmlands:
Now, a look at the border between the U.S. and Canada in eastern Montana. The borderline is sharply defined. Why? Not because of a fence but the result of different land use practices. The Americans have opened up the high plains to farming; the Canadians have left most of their side in its original state - grass-covered rolling swales.
A strange feature showed up in a Digital Globe image of "badlands" in Alberta. Erosion has carved into clay-rich sedimentary rocks leaving a bas-relief figure that remarkably resembles an Indian, complete with a warbonnet. See for yourself and judge its authenticity: is it manmade(?):
The plains of Alberta contain two large cities - Calgary and Edmonton. The former is the oil capital of Canada. It lies less than 160 km (100 miles) from the east front of the Canadian Rocky Mountains (Rockies) which have constricted to a tectonic zone about 250 km wide. Banff and Lake Louise are famed resort towns in these mountains.
This satellite image shows parts of Alberta and British Columbia, including both Edmonton and Calgary. Lake Louise is a world-famed resort (located to the upper left of the Highway marker for Route 1 [lower center]). The Chateau Lake Louise and the sheer cliffs to its south are shown in the aerial view below:
The rugged Canadian Rockies appear in this satellite image - transect across British Columbia, from the Great Plains to the Pacific Ocean.
To one traveling on the Canadian Pacific scenic railroad route, the mountains of western Canada appear continuous. But the Rockies blend in with the wide expanse of the Coast Ranges. This Radarsat image shows these mountains, here traversed by the Columbia River just north of the U.S. border.
This next image is a HCMM nighttime image covering much of southwestern Canada (swath width = 715 km [447 miles]). Starting in the upper right with part of the Rocky Mountain Trench, the terrain passes through inland hills and the mountains of the Coast Ranges (the black is cold nighttime snow), part of the Inland Passageway, and the northern half of Vancouver Island. Underneath this night expression of topograpy lie many tectonic terranes (see Section 17).
The Jewel of western Canada is Vancouver, BC, now a full-fledged city built on the Delta of the Fraser River. Across from it is Vancouver Island, with its tourist-popular small city of Victoria. South are the Georgian Bay Islands that extend to the San Juan Islands of Washington State.
Here is a skyline aerial view of Vancouver. Below that is an aerial photo of the isthmus of land that is home to the University of British Columbia, which can be compared to the setting for the University of California at Santa Barbara shown on the previous page.
Before leaving Canada we will show several scenes of the landscape of the Far North. Tundra again is typical of Canadian island surfaces well above the Arctic Circle. The islands are barren and almost totally uninhabited (a few hunters and fishermen). But with global warming, the ice between islands is melting, at least in summertime, so that eventually the famed Northwest Passage may open up seasonally, allowing ships from Europe to make a much shorter trip to and from the Orient. This MODIS image shows some of these islands:
In this next Landsat scene, the major land body is Melville Island, made up of Paleozoic sedimentary rocks and characterized by deep embayments that are valleys gouged out by continental glaciation of the Pleistocene, now occupied by the Arctic Sea which even in this July view is still completely frozen. Human life in this part of Canada’s Northwest Territories is limited to a few native villages (Eskimo types).
Another of the arctic islands is Ellesmere, seen in this satellite image:
Much of northern Canada's mainland is barren and glaciated, with variable amounts of vegetation. Here is a Landsat image of the Yellowknife region (the red denotes burn scars).
Lakes abound in such terrain. Many occupy glacially gouged fractures. Trees are mostly evergreens. This is a typical aerial view:
Now that we are in the Arctic, let's face a dilemma: Where to place Greenland in the grand scheme of the world's geography? Greenland is the largest island in the world, 2,176,000 square kilometers (the next largest, New Guinea, is only about 40% as large: the much larger Australia and Antarctica, while they look like huge islands are arbitrarily designated "continents"). Here is a map of Greenland in context with Canada (and Russia):
As seen from space by MODIS, Greenland is revealed to be almost entirely covered by an ice sheet or cap several kilometers thick:
Actually, there are small towns and settlements along the ice-free fringes of Greenland, as shown in this map:
The total population of Greenland is about 73000. Here is a typical village, whose inhabitants live mainly by fishing:
The ice on Greenland contains about 6% of the freshwater on the Earth's land surface. But, as global warming proceeds, the amount of renewed ice has been diminishing as the cap also shrinks, exposing more land.
The ice-free parts of much of Greenland are mountainous. Here is the northernmost mountain group (highest point nearly 2 kilometers above sealevel) on Earth, in a region of Greenland known as Peary Land (after the Arctic explorer, Richard Peary):
Now, we follow the birds in winter and journey southward into the Caribbean and thence to South America.
