Burning crop fields in Heilongjiang province
Burning crop fields in Heilongjiang province Today’s Image of the Day from NASA Earth Observatory shows red and orange hotspots that represent fires across Heilongjiang province in northeastern China.
The fires are lit by farmers to remove debris from the crop fields and get them ready for planting season in May.
Burning crop fields in Heilongjiang province Heilongjiang is one of the country’s most important food-producing areas, with millions of hectares of corn, rice, and beans. North America is a continent entirely within the Northern Hemisphere and almost all within the Western Hemisphere. It can also be described as the northern subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Caribbean Sea, and to the west and south by the Pacific Ocean. Because it is on the North American Tectonic Plate, Greenland is included as part of North America geographically. North America covers an area of about 24,709,000 square kilometers (9,540,000 square miles), about 16.5% of the Earth’s land area and about 4.8% of its total surface. North America is the third-largest continent by area, following Asia and Africa, and the fourth by population after Asia, Africa, and Europe
The image was captured by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the NOAA-NASA Suomi NPP satellite.
Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
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By Chrissy Sexton, Earth.com Staff Writer
