Aerial photos show ‘the human planet’—in all its beauty and pain

In October 2017 the Tubbs Fire virtually annihilated the suburban neighborhood of Coffey Park in Santa Rosa, California, destroying more than fourteen hundred homes—about one-quarter of the total number lost in Sonoma and Napa Counties. The fire was caused by an electrical problem on a privately owned property. Rising temperatures from climate change are expected to increase the frequency and size of US wildfires.

Laborers near Al Faw, Saudi Arabia, work their way through the rings of a crop circle, picking tomatoes and packing them to be shipped.

In this 1.8-mile-long open-air yard in Inner Mongolia, China, coal is sorted for the Tuoketuo coal-fired power plant, the biggest in the world. Satellite images show a black smudge all around this yard, despite fences intended to stop the spread of coal dust.

Dozens of wind turbines sprout along a dike that long ago turned a five-hundred-square-mile stretch of tidal flats into farmland in Flevoland, northeast of Amsterdam, Netherlands. As wind turbines and solar panels get cheaper and more efficient, demand for energy continues to mount—meaning that energy facilities will be prominent features of the landscape long after strip mines and smokestacks are a memory.

The Grasberg mine in Timika, Indonesia, is the world’s largest mine, and the largest producer of gold and second-largest of copper. A boon to the Indonesian economy, the mine has been a source of tension between the government and citizens who blame it for flooding their lands. It still has about $14 billion of reserves left.

Chinstrap penguins waddle toward their nesting sites at Baily Head on Deception Island, the caldera of an active volcano off the north coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. When nesting, the birds make a daily commute down to the sea to feed, staining the snow pink on their way back with excrement full of recently digested krill. This colony in the South Shetland Islands has seen a sharp drop in population in recent decades as krill populations have shifted southward.

The Greenland ice sheet is shrinking, both as the edges collapse into the sea and as the two-mile-high surface melts in summer heat—which researchers estimate is the main driver of ice loss. In 2017, two glaciologists used bright dye to track flows of meltwater near Ilulissat as it drained into crevasses and naturally formed holes called moulins. In some places, this water appears to lubricate the interface between ice and bedrock far below and to increase the rate at which ice slides toward the sea. After Antarctica, Greenland is Earth's biggest storehouse of ice and thus of potential sea-level rise.

Some 30 miles off the coast of Oregon, the C/P Alaska Ocean hauls in a 65-ton load of Pacific whiting, also known as hake. With a crew of 150, the 376-foot-long factory trawler processes its catch on board.

Alga blooms cover the surface of Lake Tai in northeastern China. Thirty years ago, the waters were clear, but the lake is surrounded by cities such as Wuxi, Suzhou, and Changzhou, which have grown rapidly in the past few decades. Sewage dumping and runoff from livestock operations have fertilized the lake, one of China's largest, contributing to blooms that include toxic blue-green algae.

Calves conceived by artificial insemination shelter in 3,300 hutches at a Milk Source farm in Greenleaf, Wisconsin. Small dairy farms are closing at a record rate in America's "Dairy State," to be replaced by factory-style operations like Milk Source, which operates throughout the Midwest. The calves will be transferred at age six months to a heifer farm.

Morning sunlight falls through the smoke from burning trees in Mato Grosso, near the center of Brazil. Thousands of square miles of forest have been burned and logged here to clear the land for cattle ranches and soy farms. Government efforts in the mid-2000s significantly reduced deforestation, but illegal logging and agriculture have driven the trend upward again since 2013.

Near Port Angeles in Washington State, loggers have left thin screens of intact trees to hide large clear-cut areas. Scientists still debate the precise impact of such industrial forestry on climate; replanted trees may eventually absorb as much climate-warming carbon dioxide as is released by logging. But the dire impacts on local biodiversity—and on the landscape—are clear.

Villagers gather brackish drinking water from shallow wells within a hundred yards of the ocean on Pate Island, in the Lamu archipelago, Kenya. Freshwater is a limited resource for the rapidly growing population. A desalination plant, which began operation in 2018, has brought welcome, if pricey, relief.