Astronaut Alex Gerst snaps thunderstorms above a dust cloud

Credit: NASA/ESA/Alex Gerst/NASA Earth Observatory

Saturday, September 27, 2014, 1:01 PM -

With all the latest buzz about Mars, it might seem like this is a shot of storms above the red planet.

But no: All that dust is raging above the Sahara Desert, and those anvils are thunderstorms high, high above them.

This was shot by the always-excellent ESA astronaut Alex Gerst on September 8, and it was described in more detail by NASA's Earth Observatory a week ago.

For more detail, here's a link to NASA's high-res version.

The storm up above is enormous. According to Earth Observatory, the storm stretched hundreds of kilometres across the planet's surface.

And that dust doesn't stay in the Sahara. Some of it will be blown far and wide, affecting the weather thousands of kilometres away.

"More dust blows out of the Sahara Desert and into the atmosphere than from any other desert in the world, and more than half of the dust deposited in the ocean lifts off from these arid North African lands," the Earth Observatory team writes. "Saharan dust influences the fertility of Atlantic waters and soils in the Americas. It blocks or reflects sunlight and affects the formation of clouds. By way of the dry Saharan air layer, dust either promotes or suppresses the development of Atlantic hurricanes, an enigma that scientists are trying to sort out."

Gerst and his colleagues aboard the International Space Station have been a gold mine of great pictures and videos on social media. Here's their timelapse of the station passing through an active aurora: