Chances are you’ve never even HEARD of the Timor Sea.

I know I hadn’t, at least until I got this absolutely incredible photo from Nasa’s Earth Observatory.  But anyway, this little area northwest of Australia (so hello to all the Aussie readers out there who are no doubt having a great laugh at the stupid American who’s never even HEARD of the Timor Sea) just had a pretty big ecological catastrophe recently–an oil spill, which Nasa satellites managed to capture.

They’ve even gone so far as to label the area of the spill for you–which is great, frankly, because I really couldn’t have made it out without that.  It just looks like a dark smear at that height, but it’s still pretty interesting to look at.  A phenomenon called sunglint is said to be responsible for giving us a clearer than normal picture of such a disaster, and by all accounts, it’s fairly rare.

It’s still pretty amazing when you get down to it–the things that pictures from space can show us are almost as exciting as the pictures we take down here.

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