Surprising Earth Pictures

NASA celebrates Earth Day by releasing an impressive collection of its most beautiful and surprising Earth images with a wide range of subjects from hurricanes to volcano eruptions and data visualizations such as average rainfalls or terrain height.

Below are ten best images of this collection that capture erupting Sarychev volcano on Russia's Kuril Islands, vast Lena Delta in Siberia, stunning canyons and glaciers of northwest Greenland, ice formations of Alaska’s Susitna Glacier, beautiful Lake Nasser in Egypt, peaceful Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas and large Rub' Al Khali desert.

Let's take a look at these images to know how our planet is when it is spotted from space.

April 17, 2010: The underside of the Space Shuttle was spotted from the International Space Station (ISS), just after the spacecraft finished its post-undocking relative separation

June 12, 2009: The ISS flew over Sarychev volcano on Russia's Kuril Islands just as it started to erupt

This image captures the Lena Delta in Siberia. The 2,800-mile-long Lena river flows into the Artic Ocean. The Lena Delta Wildlife Preserve houses many Siberian wildlife species

March 29, 2011: The operation IceBridge flew near the canyons and glaciers of northwest Greenland

In an image that was spotted at night from the ISS, we can easily see Egyptian population is concentrated almost in the Nile River Delta

August 27, 2009: An image taken with the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) aboard NASA's Tera satellite showed Alaska’s Susitna Glacier, which features ice formations flowing downhill (Vegetation is red and the surface of the glacier is marked with blue ice that is dirt-free and brown, dirty ice.)