The Aegean Sea

Credit: MODIS team; NASA, Posted on: Friday, 24 December 2004, 07:41 CST Download full size image

The Aegean Sea's deep blue waters glow in jewel-like color in this true-color Terra MODIS image from December 13, 2004. It puts nearly 320 kilometers (about 200 miles) between the shores of Greece and Turkey, while also hosting eight major groups of islands: Évvoia, the Sporades, the Cyclades, Sámos, Khíos, Lesbos, Thásos, and the Dodecanese. This region was home to a number of great city-states in ancient times, most notably Sparta, Athens, and Troy; and much of modern Western philosophy is descended from the great thinkers of the region: Socrates, Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and Gorgias, just to name a few. Low white clouds streak in vertical lines down the length of the Aegean, while high, thin cirrus clouds stretch diagonally across the Peloponnisos at lower left. Athens, the modern-day capital of Greece, sits across the bay from the large Peloponnisos peninsula. It appears as a gray spot south of a range of deep green mountains near the lower edge of the image. In the upper left, dense white fog spreads through the valleys of Macedonia and Albania.

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