How people master and destroy the planet (11 photos)
Environmental disasters and architectural heritage of the past in satellite photographs. 
Pictures of the Earth from space not only show how beautiful our planet. They expose the problems: deforestation, natural urban growth, intensive agriculture, pollution and natural disasters. In his new book Earth from Space, French photographer and environmental activist Yann Arthus-Bertrand shows how people develop seemingly uninhabitable places and often destroy local ecosystems. Look At Me posts pictures that he illustrates issues ignored by many.
Image of the Mississippi River Delta, taken by NASA two months after the explosion on the oil platform Deepwater Horizon in 2010. Vegetative is marked in red cover, blue - water, white - oil slicks. 
On the left is the rock of Uluru.
(Ayers Rock)
in Australia 3.6 kilometers long, 3 kilometers wide and 348 meters high meters. Although it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is located in national park, hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit there every year, disturb the tranquility of the unique in its biodiversity site. 
The thick line that runs across the picture is the Great Wall of China, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the largest architectural monument in the world. It is associated with a common misconception that it can supposedly see from space, although without optical instruments it is impossible. In June In 2012, the Chinese authorities announced that the length of the wall was 21,196 kilometers, although a different number was previously called - 6,499 kilometers. 
Oases south of Saudi Arabia's capital, Riyadh, where both modern and traditional irrigation methods are used. Its zones are marked with circles; the image also shows the remains of palm trees. forests. 
Bubmetuka Bay in Madagascar - the mouth of the Becibuka River. Mangrove forests are marked in red, but most of them are cut down and occupied by plantations. 
The image shows an alluvial cone between the Altyntag and Kunlun mountain ranges in China's southern Taklamakan Desert. The western part of the cone is irrigated, due to which vegetation is visible in the northwest, indicated in red. Ibid settled farmers, leading small farms. 
Wadi al-Sir Valley in Saudi Arabia. For the past thirty years, the country's authorities have been drilling wells there to find water. Pictures from different years show how farmers developed the region. Green indicates recently cultivated areas, red-orange - withered vegetation and unploughed soils, pink and yellow - desert. No one knows exactly how much water is underground, but, according to hydrologists estimate that it will last no more than 50 years. 
The city of In-Amenas in Algiers. IN January 2013 Islamists took hostages at a gas station deposit nearby. This picture was taken a week before the incident. The former oil refinery is visible on the left, a group of buildings of the Sonatrack company (developing the field), highlighted in black color, on the right - the airfield in the form of the letter Y. 
The Angkor Wat complex in Cambodia, listed in UNESCO World Heritage Sites, once inhabited by over 1 million Human. Now from the abandoned metropolitan area of the former Khmer the empire was left with temples, as well as an extensive network of canals, decorative lakes and dams. 
In this image, a grid of fields and pastures is aligned with the ornate Mississippi River, which is polluted by agricultural runoff. 
