NASA has released an image taken by the Enhanced Thematic Mapper within the Landsat 7 satellite thanks to Serge Andrefouet of the University of South Florida. Although it may seem like a New Age style painting, it represents the sands and algae of the Bahamas in all their beauty.

Just this shot was voted the most beautiful on Earth seen from space. We are talking about a very tight challenge, which lasted five rounds after over 56,000 votes. It is NASA itself that created the “Tournament Earth – Best of EO (Earth Observatory)”, to celebrate 20 years of the institution and 50 of Earth Day.

The beauty of the sandy seabed and ocean currents totalled 66.2% of the votes of the last phase of the tournament, winning the title of the most beautiful photo ever. It is yet another proof of the pristine beauty of some corners of the world, which can also be admired with the naked eye. In fact, it is possible to watch this show directly from the plane, while flying over the Caribbean. The Atlantic, in correspondence with the Bahamas, changes colour and shows us an incredible landscape, not different from that visible from space

Thanks to the shallow water and the fine sand that surrounds over 700 small islands in the archipelago; they rest on a layer of limestone coming mainly from the Sahara. You got it right. The University of Miami has revealed that the Bahamas rest on a huge number of sand particles carried by the wind for thousands of kilometres from the North African desert