4 min readImage of the Day for July 20, 2026The hills and basins of Seattle, Washington, have been sculpted by glaciers and modified by humans.NASA Earth ObservatoryJul 20, 2026 Article
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Seattle, Washington—sometimes known as the “Emerald City”—was glimmering in the morning sunlight when an astronaut aboard the International Space Station took this photo on June 16, 2026. The city’s parks and tree-filled neighborhoods lend a lush, green look to the metropolis, while tall buildings downtown cast long shadows and ships navigate surrounding waterways.
The broad contours of the city’s landscape and the water around it owe their shape to the advance and retreat of glaciers during the last ice age. Between roughly 18,000 and 16,000 years ago, the Puget lobe of the Cordilleran ice sheet covered the area in a mass of ice up to 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) thick. The glacier scoured the basins now occupied by Puget Sound and the region’s lakes.
The glacier left its mark above water, too. Several of Seattle’s notorious hills (of which there are seven or more, depending on who’s counting) are drumlins. These elongated mounds of glacial debris run north-south, parallel to the direction of the ice’s movement. East-west travelers in the city, facing challenging ups and downs, may attest to this topographic trend.
