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Earth: Your Fragile Planet (PHOTOS)

Earth wasn’t given to us by our parents; she was loaned to us by our children.

Mother Nature's Palette
Salt collectors gather salt from pools of mineral-colored water on the Senegalese coastline near the border with Gambia on June 12, 2006. Women collect salt by hand into 110-pound sacks, which sell for about just under $2. The sacks are then traded with neighboring Mauritania, where salt is mainly used for preserving fish and meat in areas that don't have access to electricity.

Photo: Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters

Soy Bean Farming Fallout

The Veu de Noiva waterfall is seen in Chapada dos Guimaraes national park, Mato Grosso state, western Brazil on January 30, 2011. The neighboring Pantanal area, a sanctuary of biodiversity, is presently at risk because of the intensive culture of soybean and the deforestation, local scientists said.
(Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images)

Spring Snow

A couple walks along a path bordered by three-meter-high snow drifts on Grouse Mountain in North Vancouver, British Columbia, on May 6, 2013. Though the lower mainland of British Columbia has been enjoying summer temperatures, the local mountains still have plenty of snow. If April showers bring May flowers, what do May snowstorms bring? Probably lots of flooding, unfortunately. Look out, Seattle.
Photo: Andy Clark/Reuters

Calved

Tourists stare at the Perito Moreno glacier after the rupture of a massive ice wall near the city of El Calafate, in southern Argentina, on March 4, 2012. The glacier, a massive tongue of ice in the Santa Cruz province, which covers 97 square miles, advances yearly into a lake, known as Lago Argentino. As Perito Moreno moves inland, it cuts off a river feeding the lake. Water builds up pressure and slowly undermines the ice, forming a tunnel until the ice eventually comes tumbling down. The phenomenon repeats itself at irregular intervals, with the last major ice falls occurring in 2008.
Photo: Andres Arce/Reuters

Fire on the Beach
The Springs Fire in California is just north of the Ventura County Line. The wind-driven wildfire prompted the evacuation of hundreds of homes this week as flames enveloped several farm buildings and vehicles near threatened neighborhoods.
Photo: Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters

Dragon's Blood Tree

The island of Socotra, located some 220 miles southeast from Yemen, is home to some of the planet's most alien-looking plants and animals. Chief among these head-tilting natural wonders is the Dragon's Blood tree. The tree, which is only found on Socotra, produces a red sap, hence its name. For thousands of years, the sap has been used by locals as a dye and as a medicine. In 2008, Socotra was recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization as a World Natural Heritage site because of its ecological diversity.
Photo: worldsupertravel.com

Algae Excavation
A fisherman uses a pitchfork to clean up green algae that covered a beach in Oingdao, China, on July 5, 2011. This particular bloom, also known as green tide, clogged nearly 7,700 square miles of China's Yellow Sea. While the algae is not poisonous—even with the unpleasant odor it leaves on the beaches—blooms can ravage underwater ecosystems because they consume large quantities of oxygen, creating "dead zones" and thereby suffocating marine life.
Photo: ChinaFotoPress/Reuters

Palmed Off
A cleared forest area under development for palm oil plantations in Indonesia's central Kalimantan province is photographed from above on July 6, 2010. The aerial shot was taken as part of a media trip organized by Greenpeace, which has campaigned against palm oil expansion in forested areas in Indonesia. Almost 90 percent of the palm oil sold around the world comes from Indonesia and Malaysia. Since 1990, 6,200 square miles of rainforests and peat lands have been cleared to make way for palm oil plantations, a clear-cutting that has pushed Sumatran tigers and orangutans to the brink of extinction.
Photo: Crack Palinggi/Reuters

Operation Icebridge
Saunders Island and Wolstenholme Fjord are photographed during an Operation Icebridge survey flight in April 2013. IceBridge, a six-year NASA mission, is the largest airborne survey of Earth's polar ice ever flown. It will yield an unprecedented three-dimensional view of Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, ice shelves and sea ice, as they continue to vanish because of global warming.
Photo: Michael Studinger/NASA/Reuters

Rainbow Eucalyptus Trees
Yeah, yeah—we know what you're thinking: This image of a rainbow eucalyptus tree, snapped in Maui, Hawaii, is a fake. A gem of a Photoshopped image. Thing is, though, it's real. The painted phenomenon occurs, simply, when patches of back peel off over time. Recently shed bark reveals bright green tree layers. Over time, the elements change these into blues and purples, and eventually into oranges and reds.
Photo: Amusing Planet

Wanted: Dry Land
A rubber glove being used as a marker bobs in the water after flooding in Fox Lake, Illinois, on April 22, 2013. The Fox River, a tributary of the Illinois River, is expected to crest today, April 23, after heavy rains brought flooding to the area last week. The high water is being blamed for three deaths, including a 12-year-old boy.
Since the Great Flood of 1993, the Mississippi River's flood plains have been turned into green spaces as thousands of homes have been bought out and emptied in an attempt to mitigate loss of life and property damages.
Photo: Jim Young/Reuters

RE: The Third Rock From the Sun
Seven million. That's the number of Earthlings added to our lovely planet each month, give or take. This staggering growth rate shines a very large, very bright spotlight on our spinning blue marble's very limited resources, namely food, water, and energy. For example, will there be enough to go around come 2100? Maybe, but only if we go all in right now on the renewable principles that will ensure a sustainable future. More solar panels and wind turbines, fewer oil derricks and coal plants. More rooftop gardens, less XL pipelines. More politicians willing to actually make an honest-to-goodness push for meaningful climate change legislation, fewer lawmakers who say they will, but probably don't really mean it. And, yes, that includes the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And so, on Earth Day 2013, ask yourself one question: What are you doing—or, more aptly, what should you be doing—to ensure that the only planet we're ever likely to call home will be inhabitable for your children and their children?
Photo: Imagecore Ltd/Getty Images

Suburban Waterfall
This winter 58-year-old Wen Hsu was worried the uninsulated water pipes running through his apartment building in Jilin Provice, China, would freeze. But instead of simply running the water once a day, or say, once every 12 hours, he went to the extreme—leaving his tap on for months and diverting the warm water flow down the side of the building. Eventually, the water froze during the region's recent cold spell.

Now the building is scheduled for demolition by a private developer who intends to use the land to build a shopping center. "They want me to move, but what they were offering was not enough for me to get another place so I'm refusing to leave," said Wen Hsu, to local media. There's no telling just how many gallons of water were wasted, but given the world water crisis—globally, 1.1 billion people don't have access to safe, clean drinking water—even a single drop is a liquid tragedy.
Photo: Via io9

A Tree in the Tire Forest
In a picture taken on April 16, 2013, a tree grows among thousands of tons of used tires left in an abandoned ten-hectare recycling installation in Lachapelle-Auzac, France. The company recycling these used tires closed in 2004 after being placed in receivership. Nine years later, amid all this rubbery rubbish, life still finds a way.
Photo: AFP Photo/Eric Cabanis/Getty Images

Simply Splendid
After heavy rain in August 2011, a fresh-water stream flows into a waterfall that cascades over a cliff and into the North Sea at Crawton in Aberdeenshire, on the east coast of Scotland. Once a thriving fishing village, Crawton has been deserted since 1927 because of overfishing.
Photo: David Hirst/Flickr Vision/Getty Images

Double Trouble
A Chinese vessel sits stuck, having run aground on a protected coral reef on April 8 at the Tubbataha National Marine Park, a UNESCO-designated World Heritage sight southwest of the Philippines. When officials boarded the ship, they found 20,000 pounds of meat from a protected species—the pangolin, or scaly anteater. "It is bad enough that the Chinese have illegally entered our seas, navigated without boat papers and crashed recklessly into a national marine park and World Heritage Site," said WWF-Philippines chief executive officer Jose Ma. Lorenzo Tan, to Yahoo News. "It is simply deplorable that they appear to be posing as fishermen to trade in illegal wildlife."
Photo: Naval Forces West Handout/Reuters

Emperor Bomb
On August 23, 2012, large chunks of ice and debris calve off of the Moshniy Glacier located on Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean located north of Russia. During the height of the Cold War, Novaya Zemlya was known as a secret military area where the most powerful nuclear device in history, a 50 megaton Soviet hydrogen bomb named "Emperor Bomb," was detonated. Now glaciers in the area are being studied because the duration of open water has increased annually due to the decrease in sea ice because of global warming.
Photo: DigitalGlobe via Getty Images

The Inevitability of Solar Power
A boy witnesses a solar eclipse as the sun sets over Albuquerque, New Mexico, on May 20, 2012. Only one percent of the total U.S. electricity output is solar, despite two head-scratching facts—one, solar energy is free; and two, enough sunlight hits the Earth in 40 minutes (that’s an episode of Lost, minus commercials) to power us for an entire year. If recent polls are to be believed, it looks as if more and more Americans are finally warming up to the fact that the sun is an inexhaustible fuel source that should be powering their iPads, their Walkmen, and their George Foreman grills. What's more, solar companies are now a fixture at home improvement shows. Another recent report shows that rooftop solar is already cheaper than grid power in over ten percent of the market in five states—California, Connecticut, Hawaii, New Hampshire, and New Jersey. That trend is projected to spread among 49 states by 2022.
Photo: Colleen Pinski/Colorado/Smithsonian.com

Bone-fied Cyclist
A skeleton riding a bicycle is displayed to demand more safety to users of the individual transport system Ecobici at the Alameda Ecobici station along Juarez Avenue, in Mexico City, on April 5, 2013. According to the Ministry of Environment of the Federal District, more than 45,000 people are using the bike-sharing system, which looks for an alternative to reduce the pollution in one of the more crowded cities around the world. Launched in 2010, Ecobici will soon be available to tourists, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, which reported: "Once considered a crime-ridden, polluted and congested city that tourists loved to miss, it has become one of the country's safer and more tourist-friendly destinations, reporting a 9 percent increase in North American tourists in 2012."
Photo: Yuri Cortez/AFP/Getty Images

Gone Forever
Some of the hundreds of totally destroyed homes are seen in the aftermath of the Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on June 28, 2012. Cooler temperatures and lighter winds helped firefighters battle the fire, which had destroyed hundreds of homes and forced more than 35,000 people to flee.
Photo: Rick Wilking/ Reuters

A Walk on the Trash Side
Two girls and a few cows (in the background) stand at a garbage disposal site filled with waste near the southern Yemeni province of Taiz, on March 31, 2013.
Photo: Mohamed al-Sayaghi/ Reuters

Fishing Time
A fisherman holds his fishing net in his mouth in a polluted river in Wuhan, Hubei province, on June 21, 2011. More than half of China's cities are affected by acid rain, and one-sixth of major rivers are so polluted the water is unfit even for farmland, a senior official said in a bleak assessment of the environmental price of the country's economic boom.
Photo: Darley Wong/Reuters

No Mas Smog
Pollution hovers over the eastern sector of Santiago, Chile, on July 30, 1999. The pollution hangs in striking contrast to the snowcapped Andes Mountains in the background. Local authorities have long battled high levels of pollution in the Chilean capital, home to 5.5 million people.
Photo: Macarena Minguell/Getty Images

No Swimming Today
From the banks of the San Juan river in Manila, one can gaze at the seemingly endless flow of garbage, as this man did while holding his daughter on January 11, 2013.
Photo: Jay Directo/Getty Images

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