Historic flooding killed hundreds across China
Historic flooding has killed hundreds across China. Today’s Image of the Day from NASA Earth Observatory features historic flooding across China during the summer monsoon season of 2020.
The photo shows the Songhua River in northeast China after the region was impacted by record amounts of rainfall.
Frequent storms across major river basins in central, southwestern, and northeastern China have caused the worst flooding conditions since 1996, according to NASA.
The floods have destroyed croplands and affected millions of people across the country.
The image was captured on October 25, 2020 by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Historic flooding has killed hundreds across China.
China emerged as one of the world’s first civilizations, in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. China was one of the world’s foremost economic powers for most of the two millennia from the 1st until the 19th century. For millennia, China’s political system was based on absolute hereditary monarchies, or dynasties, beginning with the Xia dynasty in 21st century BCE. Since then, China has expanded, fractured, and re-unified numerous times. In the 3rd century BCE, the Qin reunited core China and established the first Chinese empire.
The succeeding Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) saw some of the most advanced technology at that time, including papermaking and the compass, along with agricultural and medical improvements. The invention of gunpowder and movable type in the Tang dynasty (618–907) and Northern Song (960–1127) completed the Four Great Inventions. Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
—
By Chrissy Sexton, Earth.com Staff Writer
