Earth makes abstract art Lying in southeastern Washington State, USA, and extending into northeast O

Earth makes abstract artLying in southeastern Washington State, USA, and extending into northeast Oregon, the Palouse is a major agricultural region, characterised by rolling hills of farmland. Here, it is pictured in an image from the KARI/ESA Kompsat-2 satellite. To the south and west of the image is Walla Walla county, while the central-eastern-upper area is Columbia County.Some say that the Palouse gets its name from the French word for lawn … pelouse. It’s an idea with traction, since the Palouse is an agricultural zone dominated by wheat and vegetable production. The landscape has been compared to Tuscany. Its rolling hills are a relic of glaciation, and are formed from massive dunes of silt and wind-driven loess blown in from glacial outwash during the ice ages. The dunes are oriented with their steep sides facing northeast, and the drainage patterns seen in the image today are a vestige of the ancient sedimentary flows that created these hills.On close inspection, we can see swirling patterns in the vegetation created by ploughs and roads that cut through the shallow valleys. To the lower left of the image lies the Touchet River and a diagonal line running next to the river is a road connecting the towns of Prescott to the west to Waitsburg to the east.~SATRImage credit: KARI/ESAhttp://spaceinimages.esa.int/Images/2013/04/The_Palouse_region -- source link

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