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My book “ABCs From Space: A Discovered Alphabet” from Simon & Schuster is out!

+In her story for National Geographic, Betsy Mason says: “It started with a plume of smoke in the shape of a ‘V’ on an image of Earth taken by one of NASA’s satellites. Soon it grew into an addictive hunt for more letters, made out of glaciers, storms, lakes and craters.”

+In his review for The New York Times, Dan Yaccarino says: “Voiland provides a handy appendix that not only identifies the location of each photograph, but also gives just enough information as to what the natural phenomenon actually is to inspire budding geologists and meteorologists…Twenty or so years from now, we may point to this book as the launchpad for the careers of astrophysicists and astronauts.”

+For the The Wall Street Journal, Meghan Cox Gurdon says: “Young children will find the alphabet in amazing places in ABCs from Space, an abecedary composed of distant landforms, cloud formations and sinuous waterways…In some cases, what we see on the page accords with what we would imagine: The crisp, white, icy length of Smith Island off Antarctica—the letter “I”—sits in navy-blue seas. In other cases, the satellite measures both visible light and invisible light (invisible to the human eye, that is) rendering the landscape in extraordinary detail and psychedelic color. Here the Euphrates River appears black as it flows around the turquoise precincts of Raqqa, Syria, with blood-red farm fields on the riverbanks creating the letter “P”.

+Air & Space Magazine listed ABCs From Space as one of the Best Children’s Books of 2017. Rebecca Maksel says: “In this inventive book clouds form the letter B, a meandering river outlines an A, while cracks in sea ice make a perfect W. The book’s appendix explains the origin of each image, as well as naming the satellite that took it.”

+The National Association of Science Teachers (NSTA) and Children’s Book Council named ABCs from Space an Outstanding Trade Book for Students K-12. Read more about it.

+In its starred review, Publishers Weekly says: “In more ways than one, it’s a book that lets readers see Earth—and the alphabet—in a new light.”

+Kirkus Reviews says: “This highly unusual and scientific alphabet book will intrigue those sky gazers who see shapes in the clouds…Definitely not your usual ABC book, this sophisticated approach will best appeal to science teachers and scientifically minded children.”

+In a post for FYFD, Nicole Sharp says: “I’m often asked about resources for teaching kids about fluid dynamics, and Voiland’s book is a great option for introducing that subject, as well as many other fields of science.”

+School Library Journal says: “There is a certain nerdy awesomeness to Voiland’s photographic journey through the Roman alphabet—the sheer wonder of finding patterns in nature, especially ones that happen to resemble A’s and B’s. Voiland combed through countless NASA satellite images to find waterways, weather systems, and cloudscapes when compiling this collection.”

+In an article about the book, the Greenfield Recorder says: “The book ends with a five-page legend, which explains exactly where and when each photo was taken and what it represents, as well as an explainer about satellite images and natural and geologic forms.”

+The Brown Alumni Magazine noted: “The new book ABCs from Space: A Discovered Alphabet by Adam Voiland ’05 is a world apart from the typical “A is for Apple” genre of children’s books.”

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In January 1841, James Clark Ross was leading an expedition to find the South Magnetic Pole when he encountered a nearly perpendicular cliff that extended as far as the eye could see. Though there were mountains beckoning to him in the distance, “We might with equal chance of success try to sail through the cliffs of Dover, as to penetrate such a mass,” the British naval officer wrote in his account of the expedition.

What Ross had encountered was the edge of an ice shelf—one of the many enormous slabs of floating ice along Antarctic coastlines. These shelves form as glaciers flow off the land into cold seawater, float, and fan out on the water surface in thick slabs. There are twelve major ice shelves in Antarctica. Although some have thinned in recent decades, many would look roughly similar today to what Ross and his crew would have seen when they explored much of Antarctica’s coastlines between 1841 and 1843.

Of those twelve, the Larsen Ice Shelf, which was named after Carl Anton Larsen, would stand out to early explorers of Antarctica for showing dramatic change. Larsen is situated along the northeastern coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, one of the fastest-warming places on the planet. In the past three decades, two large sections of the ice shelf (Larsen A and B) have collapsed. A third section (Larsen C) seems like it may be on a similar trajectory, with a new iceberg poised to break away soon.

The mosaic above, centered on the northern part of Larsen Ice Shelf, is comprised of four natural-color satellite images captured by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 on January 6 and 8, 2016. It shows the remnant of Larsen B, along with the Larsen A and smaller embayments to the north covered by a much thinner layer of sea ice. The remaining shelf appears white with some deep rifts within it.

Read the full story at
NASA Earth Observatory, February 2017


The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States and third largest in the world. Once sculpted by ice, water, and powerful geologic forces over tens of millions of years, today’s Bay is shaped by human forces as well.

During the past half century, the watershed (image below) has become a landscape full of fast-spreading cities, suburbs, and farms. That development has clouded the water and reduced the productivity of the habitat. Scientists have been monitoring the Bay closely since the 1980s, and the news has often been troubling—waterways polluted with nitrogen and phosphorous, algae blooms, dead zones, and fish kills.

But glimmers of hope have begun to emerge, and efforts to clean up the Bay are starting to make a difference. The gains so far are small, and only careful monitoring will help scientists sort out which aspects of the cleanup are proving effective and which are not.

The series of stories and images below describes the natural and unnatural problems in the Chesapeake watershed, which stretches from upstate New York to Newport News.

Read the full story at
NASA Earth Observatory, December 2016

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Remote Rupert Bay in northern Quebec is a place where the majesty and dynamism of fluid dynamics is regularly on display. With several rivers pouring into this nook of James Bay, the collision of river and sea water combines with the churn of tides and the motion of currents past islands to make swirls of colorful fluid that could impress even the most jaded of baristas.

As they wind through the boreal forests and wetlands of Northern Quebec, the rivers that flow into Rupert Bay often carry water stained brown with tannins and lignins, chemical substances found in plants. Tannins and lignins from roots, leaves, seeds, bark, and soil can leach into the water and give it a yellow, brown, or even black color. (The same process gives tea its dark color.)

Read the full story at
NASA Earth Observatory, October 2016

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In 1968, Charles Ichoku was a skinny nine-year-old scouring the jungle in southern Nigeria—a refugee looking for his next meal. A bloody civil war had forced Ichoku’s family to flee their home in Zaria, a city in northern Nigeria, for Nawfia, a village in the south where his parents were born and raised.

For three years, Ichoku, his parents, and five brothers and sisters holed up in remote schools that had been converted into refugee camps. The forest cover around the camps and villages was dense enough to ward off advancing ground troops; it did not necessarily deter aircraft or missiles. Life was strange. Schools were closed; food was almost always scarce.

In the midst of war, Ichoku took solace in the natural world. “I was attracted to the order I found in nature,” he said. “Things fit together in a way that made sense.”

Nearly 50 years later, Ichoku still finds himself looking for order and sense in nature, though for very different reasons and from a very different perspective. As a senior scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Ichoku uses satellites to study fires. His latest project has brought him back to the region where he grew up, a place where more fires burn per square kilometer than virtually anywhere on Earth.

Read the full story at
NASA Earth Observatory, August 2016


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In April 2016, I participated in Carbon 12, an artist residency in Jaipur, India. I wrote the essay below after spending about a week in Jaipur. Openings will be held at the Hotel Diggi Palace and The Egg Art Studio.

It was the absurd extremes of geology that first drew me to it. Geology is a field of science that take human conceptions of time, grinds them into pulp, and buries them under layers of sand. I am someone who finds peace in knowing that there are fossilized fish on Mount Everest. Think about that: creatures of the sea stranded on Earth’s highest point.

Geology is a science that crams continents together like puzzle pieces and then systematically tears them apart. It is a science that mashes beaches into mountains, rams them thousands of meters into the air, and then fastidiously dissembles them grain by precious grain. It is a science that takes small wobbles in Earth’s orbit and turns them into ice ages, a science that can hold all of human history in a few handfuls of sand.

The absurdity and incomprehensibility of time is the thread that unifies geology. If you took Earth’s 4.6 billion years and represented all of that time as a 24 hour day, the first people emerge at about 11:58 pm. We know this date because of carbon, an element forged in the bowels of stars where temperatures soar above 100,000,000 degrees Kelvin.

There are three types of carbon that occur naturally: Carbon-12, Carbon-13, and Carbon-14. Carbon-14, which has 14 neutrons, forms when cosmic rays — high energy particles from beyond the solar system — bombard Earth’s atmosphere. Living plants and animals constantly absorb Carbon-14, but they stop absorbing it when they die. Since Carbon-14 is radioactive and unstable, it immediately begins to decay into Carbon-12. Whatever the creature, the rate of decay is always the same. After 5,730 years, half of the Carbon-14 in any tooth, any strand of hair, any piece of wood, anything with carbon in it becomes Carbon-12. So by comparing the ratio of Carbon-14 to 12, geologists can tell you exactly how old something is.

The centrality of carbon to our world is astounding. Nothing that we consider living lacks carbon. When we head to the forest for quiet, we surround ourselves with carbon. When we heat our homes and fuel our cars, we burn carbon. When we paint and draw, we often smear carbon on canvas. When we marry, we attach chunks of carbon to our wedding rings. When we burn wood, we fill the air with tiny bits of blackened carbon.

There are two characteristics of carbon that make it such a flexible, ubiquitous, and essential element. First, it has a remarkable ability to bond with other elements, even those that are quite different. Second, carbon often arranges itself into long, flexible chains when it bonds.

These same features are built into the structure of Carbon-12, the Jaipur-based painting residency that inspired the work you see presented here. Just as I was drawn to geology for its extremes, I was drawn to Carbon-12 for its affinity for difference. The group includes artists from Iran (Roya Delkhosh), the United States (Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann), Lithuania (Audrius Grazys, Giedr? Riškut?, Dovile Norkute), Mexico (Margarita Chacon Bache), South Korea (Bo-Suk Lee), France (Melanie Challe), Norway (Grete Marstein), Chile (Joan Belmar), India (Premila Singh), and the Ivory Coast (Claudie Tit. Dimbeng). The works range from the abstract to the realistic, from the colorful to the colorless, from the intimate to the grandiose.

There is little doubt that in some ways our differences are profound. Vast gulfs in culture and experience meant the artists could assume little about the others when they began this collaboration. During the two weeks spent in Jaipur at the Hotel Diggi Palace making art, sometimes even basic communication was a challenge. We occasionally stumbled in conversations while we tried to remember some word or some place in a foreign language or country. We puzzled over our different habits, our different tastes, our different religions, and the different systems of government in our home countries.

Yet, despite our differences, we also found that we shared common unspoken languages as well: a fascination with light and color, with paint and paper, and with the city of Jaipur. We bonded over pulp and fiber at a handmade paper factory and stood agape as a local master painted elephants on a grain of rice.

Every atom of carbon has four empty spaces in it that electrons from elements of other types can fill. In fact, it’s these empty spaces that make it possible for carbon to bond so easily into seemingly unrelated things: coal, diamond, graphite, oil, soot, bone, leaf, blood, smoke, bark — all of these things are made of carbon but arranged in different ways or bonded with a different set of neighbors. The same spirit of exchange and transformation defines painting and infused the Carbon 12 residency.

I found myself drawn to Jaipur for the same reason I was drawn to geology — the absurdity of the extremes. Jaipur is a city where simple rickshaws and bicycles share the roads with luxury cars. It is a place where the stunning beauty of its textiles, its jewels, its palaces coexist with the realities of poverty. It is a place where the serenity of its temples and gardens compete with the acoustic inferno of its traffic horns, a place where the pleasant scents of curry — thousands of years of wisdom stewed to perfection — mingle in the streets with jasmine and the acrid scent of soot and sweat.

As a science writer for the NASA Earth Observatory, I spend many of my waking hours observing Earth from above. Over the last half century, the scientific community has lofted hundreds of satellites into orbit. Some are large, the size of buses; some are tiny, the size of a loaf of bread. Some are designed to study ice, others clouds, others the ocean, others forests, and others the particles of smoke and haze that drift in the atmosphere.

From space, we see vast transformations with these satellites. We see huge bands of fire where fires would never occur if people had not lit them. We see massive fields of once white glacial ice becoming brown and gray as winds paint them with soot and dust. We see oceans that were once clear swirling with explosive blooms of algae that thrive in polluted waters. We see once brimming lakes going dry.

I sometimes leave my office feeling pessimistic about the future. When you consider how drastically our planet has changed in the last few hundred years and how drastically it appears poised to continue changing, the problems can seem insurmountable. However, coming to northern India, meeting the Carbon 12 artists, and watching the care that went into the creation of each piece has reminded me that we have no choice but to confront these problems. There is simply too much at stake — too much history, too much beauty, too much about our planet that is irreplaceable for us to look the other way.

I am sure viewers of Carbon 12 will have other responses when they see these paintings — and they should — but I do hope that the overriding reaction is a complete inability to look away. Each painting is both a problem and a solution, a beginning and an end, an answer and a question. Every single one of them, like our home planet, is the product of cycles of creation and destruction. Every single one of them, like Jaipur, is a celebration of extremes.

Screen Shot 2016-04-24 at 8.04.00 AMNote on images: Satellite images captured the MODIS sensor on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Learn more about them here. Photographs taken by Adam Voiland.