NASA images show that Earth is fast Changing … for the Worse

Change is inevitable. Climates change. Environments change. People change. Unfortunately, however, unless people around the world change for the better when it comes to the environment, life on Planet Earth will change for the worse, along with a changing climate.

The Helheim Glacier in, Greenland has been melting fast. Photo Credit: NASA

You don’t have to take that on faith. You can see it with your own eyes. NASA has just published a series of eye-opening pictures that were all taken of places on Earth years or decades apart. The “before” and “after” shots show the dramatic changes that those places, from the US to India to Greenland, have undergone.

Ice sheets have melted. Lakes have shriveled up. Forest have been cut down. Urban areas have taken over giant swathes of previously leafy areas.

Take the Helheim Glacier in Greenland, which has been melting all too visibly. Situated along the edge of the ice sheet in Greenland, “outlet glaciers flow as icy rivers through fjords and out to sea. These pictures show a fjord in which Helheim Glacier (on the left) is crumbling into large and small icebergs (light blue, on the right),” NASA explains. “The glacier outlet held steady from the 1970s until about 2001, then began to retreat toward its source about 4/7 miles between 2001 and 2005. The glacier’s flow to the sea has also sped up.”

Or take Lake Poopó in Bolivia, which has all but disappeared within the space of just three years, between 2013 and 2016. “Lake Poopó, Bolivia’s second-largest lake and an important fishing resource for local communities, has dried up once again because of a drought and diversion of water sources for mining and agriculture,” NASA observes. “The last time it dried was in 1994, after which it took several years for water to return and even longer for ecosystems to recover.”

Cities like New Delhi have increased exponentially at the expense of surrounding green areas. Photo Credit: NASA

Or take the unrelenting expansion of New Delhi, India’s capital, which has swallowed up the neighboring countryside since 1991. Then there’s the Baban Rafi rainforest, a primary woodland area in the West African nation of Niger, which has lost out to agriculture. “Population in this region quadrupled during the 40 years leading up to the 2007 image,” NASA says.

Needless to say, we could take plenty of similar pictures across Malaysia as well to demonstrate the extensive loss of forests, the relentless march of urban sprawl, and the march of destructive development in its myriad forms.

This is the brave-new world we are making. The question is: Do we really want to live in it?