From space, the Grand Canyon looks like a treacherous crack across Earth's surface.

This glacial chunk has almost completely detached from the larger Antarctic Pine Island Glacier and is large enough to fit eight Manhattan-size cities on it.

This false-colored image of western Australia shows sediment and nutrient flow patterns (blue/yellow/red) in the mouth of a nearby river.

One of the largest landslides of this decade took place February in southeastern Alaska. The landslide involved 68 million metric tons of material, and the aftermath is shown here by the brown streak smeared across the snowy background.

A reservoir of the Colorado River, Lake Powell stretches across the border between Utah and Arizona. Since the turn of the century it has suffered from drought, and at the time this picture was taken last May it was more than half empty.

The Paluweh Volcano erupted in late 2012 and continued spewing material south of the summit months after the eruption. But in mid-2013 a smaller, second eruption deposited material to the north, killing five people. You can see the brown material deposits both at south and north of the summit.

Between these two volcanoes in northern Chile is the Chao dacite, which is a type of lava dome with characteristic ripples that form when exceptionally thick, sticky lava flows onto a steep surface.

Here, you see active Idaho Wildfires and residual burn scars in the Elk and Beaver Creek Complexes.

In spring, blue ponds speckle southwest Greenland as ice melts. The size and number of these ponds help track how much the ice sheet is melting each year.

The upper, central pocket of water is the San Pablo Bay, which connects to the San Francisco Bay to the south, which then feeds into the Pacific Ocean. You can clearly see how murky, muddy coastal waters make their way out to the surrounding ocean.

California’s Mount Shasta is a popular place for skiing in the winter, but not this year. Limited snowfall meant only 2 to 3 inches on the slopes last January — too little for skiing.

A black plume of smoke extends miles down from the largest oil refinery in Iraq, which was set on fire by insurgents who attacked the refinery earlier this year.

 

This false-colored image taken last September shows fresh lava in red spewing from the Holuhraun lava field in Iceland.

Harlequin Lake, sitting just south of the red arrow, borders Yakutat glacier. Located in southeastern Alaska, Yakutat glacier is one of the world's fastest-retreating glaciers. The red arrow shows the icebergs that form as the glacier melts and breaks apart.

Beautiful swirls of ice decorate the edge of Lake Superior. Parts of the lake remained frozen as late as May of this year, when this image was taken of the region near Chequamegon Bay, Wisconsin.

Indicated here is the world's largest acidic lake, which fills a crater carved out at the summit of the Kawah Ijen volcano in Indonesia. The lake's bizarre turquoise shade comes from the hydrochloric and sulfuric acids that result from dissolved materials. The acidity of the lake is about five times stronger than battery acid.

European Space Agency

Now check out some more images from space that will take your breath away >>