Patagonia’s icefields, Australia’s changing tides, and volcanic activity in Alaska are among the images captured by Nasa and the ESA last month

Alaska’s remote Bogoslof Island volcano erupted in a series of explosions starting in December 2016, triggering the highest aviation alert as it shot ash plumes at least 35,000ft into the atmosphere. By monitoring the volcano via satellite and seismologic data, scientists can provide a warning of when further eruptions could pose a risk to aircraft. This image shows just a small puff of smoke rising from the volcano, while a sediment plume drifts towards the top left of the image, turning the Bering Sea a bright blue-green.

The Vanuatu archipelago is situated in the South Pacific Ocean; this image shows two of its islands: Pentecost island to the north and Ambrym island to the south. The red-hot lava lakes of Ambrym’s two active volcanoes can be seen through the clouds, with a smoke plume drifting out to the west.

Turquoise swirls in the Black Sea indicate a phytoplankton bloom. Coccolithophores are one kind of phytoplankton found in the Black Sea, and are plated with white calcium carbonate that makes the water appear bright from space. But not all phytoplankton have this effect – diatoms, which also bloom in the Black Sea, darken the water instead, say Nasa scientists.

Patagonia’s icefields stretch for hundreds of kilometres along the Andes mountains in Chile and Argentina. Two areas, a north and south icefield, are all that remains of a vast ice sheet that reached its peak 18,000 years ago. Today, climate change is thinning the ice further still. This image shows the entire north Patagonian icefield – the smaller of the two.

Nasa’s Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) allows scientists to capture the rift on the Larsen C ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula even in the dark of winter. In this false-colour image the blue hue of the crack can be compared to the orange of the warmer areas of open ocean and thin sea ice, and the lighter blues and whites of the colder ice shelf.

The snaking shape of Pakistan’s Indus River can be seen even in nighttime satellite imagery. Though the river itself is barely visible, the dark crops and vegetation growing along its banks reveal the general shape of the river, with the brighter desert beyond.

Before and after images show the extent of severe flooding in Sri Lanka, in the town of Matara, one of the hardest hit places.

The Spanish town of Isla Mayor, is located near the marshlands of the Unesco listed Doñana national park. The fish ponds there – seen here as larger, multi-coloured squares – are fed with river water, which contains natural food including algae and shrimp, rather than commercial fish feed or antibiotics, to help preserve the wetlands. The smaller, dark rectangles are rice fields, an agricultural practice that is being phased out, along with cattle raising, to further encourage the return of a more natural wetland landscape.

Smoke plumes spread out over Lake Baikal and the Angara River in southern Siberia after wildfires broke out in late June, burning at least 27,000 hectares (100 sq miles) in the Irkutsk Oblast region and another 27,000 hectares in neighbouring areas, according to Russian state media.

The Great Barrier Reef off Australia’s northeast coast.

Tomales Bay lies about 50km (30 miles) northwest of San Francisco. In this image, two shades of green clearly show the different types of vegetation on the island – dark green conifer forests on the western shore and light green grasslands on the east. What we can’t see beneath the surface is the San Andreas Fault line that runs between two tectonic plates and famously partitions California for hundreds of miles.

The central Meidob volcanic field in western Sudan covers an area of about 5,000 sq km and is dotted with nearly 700 vents that are thought to be about six million years old. The area shown here has distinctive landforms that include explosively-formed maar craters, lava domes built by viscous lava flows, and scoria or cinder cones formed around a single volcanic vent.

The Thar Desert in India, with the city of Bikaner visible in the lower part of the image, surrounded by agricultural land and sand dunes. The red areas are vegetation. Satellite data on land cover and land cover changes can be used to combat drought and desertification in regions such as this.

Kings Sound, on Australia’s northwest coast. The sound has one of the world’s largest tidal ranges, at about 11-12 meters, second only to that of the Bay of Fundy on Canada’s Atlantic coast. Lighter shades show areas that are often exposed, darker shades are areas that are only above water at low tide, with the darkest shade being perpetually submerged areas.

An Australian research team has created an intertidal zone map for the entire Australian coast – approximately 50,000 km (30,000 miles) – using 28 years of Landsat data. The maps can be used by coastal resource managers to help protect intertidal zones and the benefits they provide, particularly in response to the growing pressures of sea-level rise and land reclamation.

The coast of Newfoundland in Canada and the estuary of river St Laurent, with ice visible along the coast. Warming temperatures caused perilous ice, up to eight metres thick, to drift south from the Arctic and clog the coasts of Newfoundland, Labrador and Quebec, where it trapped boats and ferries as late as June.