Daily Overview

One regular dose of Earth from above

New Overviews are posted regularly on Instagram — follow @dailyoverview to see them as soon as they go up.

Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl

19.400000°,-98.988889° - Maxar

Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl—a municipality of Mexico City, Mexico—is characterized by its long, straight, and gridded streets. With a population of more than one million people (the entirety of Mexico City contains approximately 9 million residents), the area is home to many of the capital’s citizens who have migrated there from other parts of the country.

Casablanca

33.548213°,-7.574324° - Maxar

Casablanca is the largest city in Morocco with roughly 3.8 million residents, accounting for 11% of the entire country's population. Many officials believe these figures are underestimated and the total population is actually somewhere between 5 and 6 million. The Cite Djemaa neighborhood, located in the southeast of the city, is seen here.

Jeddah Corniche Circuit

21.623611°,39.108333° - Formula 1

The Jeddah Corniche Circuit will play host to the first-ever Saudi Arabian F1 Grand Prix tomorrow, December 5th. Featuring 27 turns and measuring 3.8 miles (6.2 km), it is one of the longest tracks in use by Formula 1. Coming into the circuit’s final corner, it is expected that drivers will reach speeds as high as 200 mph (322 km/h).

San Francisco Bay

37.670000°,-122.270000° - Planet

Water and sediment swirl through San Francisco Bay, mixing with the Pacific Ocean on the west coast of California. The Bay, which covers roughly 1,600 square miles (4,000 square km), drains water from approximately 40% of the state — including the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers and the Sierra Nevada mountains. Surrounding the Bay are the cities of San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland.

Chicago Polar Vortex

41.833647°,-87.872390° - ESA

The frozen waters of Lake Michigan border the snow-covered city of Chicago, Illinois, USA, during the polar vortex that occurred in January 2019. Chicago finished off that January with 13 consecutive days of snow and some of its coldest temperatures in more than three decades.

Bolivia Lithium Mining

-20.563929°,-67.376575° - Maxar

Lithium mining operations are visible at Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat in Bolivia. The white surface surrounding these evaporation ponds is the natural color of the salt flats. Lithium is a reactive alkali metal primarily used to create lithium-ion batteries, which power everything from smartphones to electric vehicles. The mining process begins by drilling and pumping water into holes in the salt flats to bring salty, mineral-rich brines to the surface. The brine is left in pools to evaporate for months, creating a mixture of minerals that are continuously filtered until enough lithium carbonate can be extracted.

Cranberry Bogs

41.914292°,-70.792761° - Nearmap

If you put cranberries on your Thanksgiving turkey today, there’s a chance they came from these bogs in Plymouth, Massachusetts, USA. Cranberries are a Native American wetland fruit that are grown on low-lying vines, floating in beds of water layered with sand, peat, gravel, and clay. Coincidentally, the town of Plymouth is also the site of the colony founded by the Pilgrims in 1620 and was the home to the first Thanksgiving feast in 1621. Happy Thanksgiving from Daily Overview!

Fafan Zone

9.493153°,43.105028° - Planet

Agricultural fields surround several small villages in the Fafan Zone of Ethiopia. Located on Ethiopia’s eastern border with Somalia, this region contains some small cities but is mostly agrarian. Farmers here raise livestock and grow cereals like sorghum, maize and teff—a grass native to the Horn of Africa.

Istanbul

41.013611°,28.955000° - Planet

Istanbul is the most populous city in Turkey with roughly 15.5 million residents. As seen in this Overview, it is a transcontinental city - straddling both sides of the Bosporus Strait between Europe and Asia. Istanbul’s strategic position between the Black and Mediterranean Seas has made the city a gateway for the spread of people, goods, and ideas throughout its history.

Willemstad, Netherlands

51.691944°,4.437778° - Maxar

Willemstad is a city of 3,125 in the Noord-Brabant province of the Netherlands. Its historic center lies within a 17th century star fort on the south bank of the Hollands Diep river. Willemstad is the namesake for the capital city of Curaçao, an island country in the Dutch Caribbean.

San Francisco Low Angle

37.777500°,-122.416389° - Maxar

This breathtaking Overview captures the city of San Francisco, California and the surrounding 'Bay Area' like you've never seen it before! DigitalGlobe's WorldView-3 satellite was a remarkable 800 miles away over the Pacific Ocean when this image was captured. The focal length of the satellite camera is 32 times longer than a standard DSLR camera, making a view like this possible. Within the frame, many of the city's landmarks are visible, including the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, Alcatraz, and Golden Gate Park.

Venice, Italy

45.437500°,12.335833° - Maxar

Venice, Italy, is situated upon 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by bridges. The Grand Canal—the city’s 2.4-mile-long (3.9 km) central waterway lined by 170 buildings—is visible in this Overview. With water so central to the city, Venice is already starting to feel the impacts of rising tides and sea levels. Living by water is the norm for most urban dwellers, with 90 percent of major urban areas situated on the coast of a major body of water.

Antarctic Sea Ice Melt 2021

-75.250973°,-0.071389° - Maxar

Large chunks of sea ice break away from the coast of Antarctica. This Overview was captured on April 22, 2021. In the 1980s, Antarctica lost 40 billion tons (36.3 billion metric tons) of ice each year. In the last decade, that figure was estimated at a staggering 252 billion tons (229 billion metric tons) per year.

Bertioga

-23.721107°,-45.866850° - Maxar

Rainforest surrounds a neighborhood of Bertioga, Brazil, roughly 50 miles (80 km) southeast of São Paulo. Bertioga has a population of about 56,000, but its location between resort towns on the Atlantic Ocean causes its population to fluctuate greatly from season to season. Within the municipality is 23,010 acres (9,312 hectares) of the Restinga de Bertioga State Park, a protected area for mangroves, dense rainforest, and restinga — a distinct type of tropical broadleaf forest endemic to eastern Brazil.

Sete Cidades

37.861671°,-25.793875° - Airbus Space

The Sete Cidades Massif occupies the far western end of São Miguel Island in the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores. Covering 42 square miles (110 square km), it comprises a central volcano and lake-filled caldera with depths ranging from 660 feet (200 m) to 1,600 feet (500 m). In the center of the massif is a village of the same name with nearly 800 inhabitants.

Anhui and Henan Provinces

33.846370°,115.780616° - Airbus Space

Towns and cities are scattered across China's Anhui and Henan provinces, resembling stars in the night sky. Several cities can be seen from this perspective, including Bozhou (center), Huaibei (right), Shangqui (top), and Fuyang (bottom). Altogether, more than 160 million people live in these two provinces—61 million in Anhui and 99 million in Henan.

Sausalito Yachts

37.858514°,-122.482613° - Nearmap

Boats are docked at a marina on Richardson Bay in Sausalito, California. Located just across the Golden Gate Strait from San Francisco, Sausalito is a town of roughly 7,000 residents with a picturesque location that inspired “Sittin’ On The Dock of the Bay,” by Otis Redding—a song he wrote while he staying on a houseboat here in 1967.

Sossusvlei

-24.733333°,15.366667° - Maxar

Sossusvlei is a salt and clay pan located on the edge of the Namib Desert in Namibia. The reddish sand dunes of the desert seen here are among the tallest in the world, with many rising more than 656 feet (200 metres) in height. This image shows approximately 300 square kilometres (116 square miles) of Sossusvlei.

Museum of Pop Culture

47.621500°,-122.348611° - Nearmap

The Museum of Pop Culture (also known as MoPOP) is a nonprofit museum in Seattle, Washington, dedicated to contemporary popular culture. Founded in 2000, it contains exhibits on fantasy, horror cinema, video games, science fiction, music and more. The museum’s unique, 140,000-square-foot (13,000 sq. meter) structure was designed by architect Frank Gehry.

Alderney

49.713007°,-2.205775° - Airbus Space

Alderney is the northernmost of the inhabited Channel Islands, part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey, a British Crown dependency. It is 3 square miles (8 square km) in area and home to just over 2,000 people. A majority of the population lives in Saint Anne, Alderney’s main town and capital.