• Poplar Island rises out of the Chesapeake Bay as it’s rebuilt by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers using dredged mud from the Baltimore Harbor which lies about 30 miles (about 48 kilometers) north of the island. In these Landsat images, the dikes that contain the mud and hold it in place begin appearing in 1998. This growing island is a wildlife sanctuary, a hatchery for hundreds of diamondback terrapins and home to about 170 different species of birds including terns and bald eagles.
NASA and the U.S. Department of the Interior through the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) jointly manage Landsat. The USGS preserves the archive of Landsat images and distributes all of the 40-years of Landsat data free over the Internet.
Source: NASA Goddard Mutlimedia
Further Information:
+ Download video: Rebuilding Poplar Island
+ “Escapes: Rebuilding Maryland’s wild islands” The Washington Post [external link]