Off the southeast coast of Africa is the fourth largest island non-continental in the world, now known as the Malagasy Republic but once called Madagascar. This Landsat scene shows some of its northwestern lands, drained by the Mahajamba/Sofia rivers to the north and the Ikopa/Betsiboka river further south (after they join, they form a distinctive inland multichannel drainage pattern. The dark red marks a forest that survive the general land clearing, leaving much of the landscape as a savannah.
The Horn of Africa is occupied by part of Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia, and Eritrea. In the Landsat mosaic below, the Red Sea meets the Gulf of Aden at what is known geologically as a triple point (meeting of three plates), producing the Afar Triangle. Fault zones underlie each of the three arms. The land portion becomes the Rift Zone. The dark areas on the African side (the Arabian side has the country of Yemen) are young basaltic flows that inundate tens of thousands of square kilometers.
One of the dominant and most historic rivers on Earth is the Nile - 6695 km (4185 miles) long (its White Nile Branch). Here is a map showing its extent and the countries it affects.
Living almost exclusively along the Nile, Egyptian and Sudanese civilizations flourished in the narrow floodplains and irrigated bank lands for at least 4 millenia. The main tributary to the Nile is called the Blue Nile, which starts from Lake Tana in Ethiopia. The White Nile's source was unknown until the 19th century when a British explorer finally traced it to Africa's largest inland body of water, Lake Victoria, one of a group in several central African countries:
This intriguing Landsat image below shows the White Nile as it flows through southern Sudan enroute to joining the Blue Nile at Khartoum. The dark tones are organic soils developed on ancient rocks. Savannah grasses, acacia, and riverine vegetation account for the reds in this false color rendition.
Khartoum is one of the larger African cities - more than a million people. Here is a view from the International Space Station, showing that, like the Amazon-Rio Negro rivers seen earlier in this Section, the two streams differ in the silt loads they contain.
One of the most striking space views of Africa is the Nile Delta built as the great Nile River splits into the Rosetta Nile (left) and the Domietta Nile (right) while emptying into the southeastern Mediterranean Sea. The roughly triangular appearance struck ancient mappers as looking like the Greek letter D, as viewed from the north, hence the term "delta" has been applied to similar river mouth depositional landforms worldwide. The delta, with its system of canals spreading from the main stream pair, is so well irrigated that it is given almost totally to farming of, principally, cotton along with corn and other foodstuffs. Flooding used to supply water replenishment but this has largely ceased since the building of the Aswan Dam well to the south. The largest city in Africa, Cairo, with well over 6 million residents, is the bluish patch near the bottom apex of the delta. Most of Egypt is like the light colored areas to the west and east, sand-covered land unsuited to any production of edibles. Coastal sand dunes have blocked off lagoons, with salt marshes.
Let us put the Nile Delta more in context with its surroundings. Here is a Landsat mosaic covering much of Egypt that gives a better idea of the desert sands and bedrock beyond the Nile.:
The previous two images do not have the resolution needed to pick out the Suez Canal, built under the direction of the famed Ferdinand de Lesseps in the 19th Century. Here it is as it reaches the Mediterranean.
A feel for how barren most of Egypt and northern Sudan are is gained from this astronaut photo looking eastward taken during the Apollo 9 mission:
As the Nile runs towards its source in central Africa, it passes through the Republic of Sudan and splits near Khartoum into the White Nile, seen here, and the Blue Nile to the east, off the image. The clay-surfaced land, with occasional dunes (bottom), can be tilled to support crops, if properly watered. Water drawn from the Blue Nile, derived from the Sennar Dam as part of the Gezira Scheme, provides abundant irrigation for very distinctive, elongated farms whose main crop is cotton, the prime export from the Sudan. The soils is sufficiently depleted of some nutrients to require crop rotation (usually to millet) during alternate years.
We are now ready to cross over into the Middle East. The next image is a mosaic showing the "hot spot" of the Middle East, Israel and neighboring countries, a land of seemingly never ending strife and hostility but also with Jerusalem as the site of ancient holy places associated with three great religions. The Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea (south) both lie astride the great Dead Sea fault, a strike-slip fracture akin to the San Andreas fault; here too is the boundary of two tectonic plates. Lebanon (with Beirut), part of Syria (with Damascus and the Golan Heights), Jordan, and a sliver of the Sinai Peninsula all appear in this image.
It is informative to compare this mosaic with an oblique photo looking west as taken by astronaut Shannon Lucid from the space station MIR. While the latter presents a different perspective, it does not bring out the scene richness that the computer-processed Landsat mosaic offers. Note on the left the boundary between Israel and Egypt's Sinai; land use practice through irrigated farming by the Israelis accounts for this. More on human photography from space in Section 12.
A closer look at this Mideast center of history and current trouble spot is offered in this Terra MODIS view (below), with some of the geographic features in Israel, the West Bank (Palestine) and neighboring countries identified by annotation. The green area at the bottom of the Dead Sea is a manmade evaporation basin in which salt is extracted from the saline waters piped in from this body of water which is largely below sea level.
The Holy City of Jerusalem appears as a darker "blotch" in the Terra image. An ASTER image shows a close-up of Jerusalem (this image indicates the the areal extent of Jerusalem is not that large):
This is an aerial oblique view of the inner part of greater Jerusalem: The golden domed building is the Dome of the Rock, a holy Moslem shrine that lies within the Old City (walled). It is visible as a yellow dot just left of center in the ASTER image.The sacred ground of the Old City has been subdivided into four sectors: Armenian; Christian; Jewish; Moslem. Some of East (Moslem) and West (mainly Jewish) Jerusalem is in this scene but modern Jerusalem extends well beyond. The Dome of the Rock dominates this high resolution IKONOS image of the Old City: The next image is another Landsat scene of an area to the east of Israel. The mouth of the fabled Tigris and Euphrates Rivers empties through a delta into the Persian Gulf in southeastern Iraq. Those rivers meet into a single channel, the al Arab, in the swamplands in the upper left of the image. Crops along the river include wheat, millet, sorghum, cotton, rice, and dates. The Rivers Karun (top center) and Jarrahi (right center) are both in western Iran. The lower left corner is a barren desert, with sand dunes, which includes part of Kuwait, over which the Gulf War in 1991 was fought between a coalition of nations and the Iraqui invaders (see page 13-4c). Several black plumes of smoke emanate from the burning of gases released from oil fields. Kuwait lies atop
one of the richest concentrations of oil and gas in the world. Much of the Arabian Peninsula - actually a huge, wide land mass bounded by the Red Sea and Persian Gulf and thus not strictly a peninsula in geographic terms - is covered by barren desert and vast sand seas. But, as seen in this mosiac its western side is composed of the Arabian Shield, a great mass of crystalline rocks (mostly metamorphic) that were once part of eastern Africa until separated by plate tectonic rifting in the Tertiary Period. The highest part in this scene is a dissected scarp that runs from along the west edge. The scarp in places is almost 1.6 km (1 mile) high, and erosion in this area leads to mountain-like prominences.. The plateau to its northeast includes dark volcanic rocks
(younger basalts). In the coastal plains against the Red Sea is a mix of natural vegetation and localized farmlands. (See page 17-3 for a Landsat mosaic that shows a much larger part of the Arabian Shield.) Most of Saudi Arabia is barren desert in the classic sense, namely, millions of acres of sand hundreds of meters thick, with surfaces showing a variety of dune types. The Empty Quarter of southern Saudi Arabia is host to the Ar Rab Al Khali basin and desert fill. Several types of dunes are expressed in this Landsat image:
While more properly placed in southern Asia, the country of Iran is often thought of as part of the Middle East since it is politically tied to the Muslim communities such as Syria and Saudi Arabia. The capital, Tehran, is shown in this Landsat-1 image as a dark area just off the image center:
