In the 2021 edition of its Tournament Earth contest, which pits astronaut-shot photographs against each other, NASA saw 32 images of the planet running head to head to determine the view that would enamor people the most. 930,000 votes and five rounds later, it was down to just one: a photo of Lake Van in Turkey, snapped by Kate Rubins aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in September 2016 (shown above).
Lake Van is the largest soda or alkaline lake on Earth, and is an endorheic water body, meaning that it has “no outlet,” NASA explained. This means its water only escapes through evaporation. The swirls caught in the image are turbidity plumes, light- and dark-toned water made up of “calcium carbonate, detrital materials, and some organic matter.”
NASA’s Earth Observatory described in another note that taking photos from the space station is especially tricky as the facility “moves so quickly.” Even if they were snapped using a digital camera, which is able to capture image “within 1/1000th of a second,” they could still turn out looking blurry or distorted.
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