Technicolour dream planet: Earth as you’ve never seen it before

They look like beautiful abstract splashes of colour not to dissimilar to work by Van Gogh but these vivid pictures are in fact planet Earth – as art.

The US Geological Survey National Centre has used different combinations of satellite images from Landsat 7 and Terra Satellites to create the show-stopping pictures capturing of the intricacy of the earth’s natural beauty.

Scientists then used a different colour for each radiation wavelength, most of which are invisible to the naked eye, allowing them to look at the Earth’s surface in different colours to its natural colours.