Superior Sediment

Superior Sediment

After torrential downpours hit parts of northern Michigan and Wisconsin, swollen rivers sent sediment pouring into Lake Superior. Soil, sediment, and other particles ran off farmlands and towns, discoloring the water in the rivers and the lake.

This image, acquired on June 19, 2018, by the MultiSpectral Instrument (MSI) on the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2, shows a portion of the Bois Brule River and the Brule River Boreal Forest in Wisconsin. New, darker sediment is flowing into an already discolored Lake Superior.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2018) processed by the European Space Agency. Text by Joshua Stevens.