Beautiful sediment plumes in the Gulf of Mexico

If you don’t already have NASA’s Earth Observatory site in your reader or bookmarked somewhere, you should. It has scores of fantastic images of Earth surface processes in action. If you are into sedimentation processes like me, it is a great resource for very cool images.

Last week they posted this beautiful image taken this month (April 2009) of the greater Mississippi River delta and northern Gulf of Mexico. Click on the image (or here) to go to the EO site.

Muddy sediment plumes in northern Gulf of Mexico (credit: NASA Earth Observatory - http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=38273&src=eorss-iotd)

Check out these beautiful sediment plumes extending from the various river mouths.

Here is a close-up of the Mississippi birdsfoot itself.

Sediment plume from Mississippi River delta (credit: NASA Earth Observatory)

Very cool.

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Note: I took the original image into Photoshop and played around with the settings to enhance the plumes a bit more.

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