NASA satellite captures images of isolated forest in Malawi

BLANTYRE, Malawi, Jan. 2 (UPI) — Mulanje Massif is rather impressive from ground level; but it may be most stunning from 440 miles above Earth’s surface. That’s the vantage point through which NASA’s Landsat 8, one of the agency’s Earth Observation satellites, viewed the Malawian mountain top most recently.

The isolated outcropping of rock — a geologic feature known as an inselberg or monadnock — rises abruptly from the dry surrounding plains of Malawi’s tea-rowing district, Chiradzulu. The isolated mimi mountain rises 4,500 feet — the product of massive globs of granite and syenite that bubbled from beneath some 130 million years.

While the latest photos from Landsat 8’s camera, the Operational Land Imager, don’t do justice to Mulanje’s verticality, it does document the climatological effects of precipitous elevation changes.

Mallanje Massif is located in southern Malawi, near the border with Mozambique. Because the region is currently experiencing its dry season, the forested monadnock offers quite a contrast to the surrounding brown and orange plains.

The mountain’s sharp rise is enough for it to disturb induced air flow, causing clouds to form and squeezing rain from the otherwise dry atmosphere. The precipitation not only enables forests, but also supplies water to nearly all of Malawi’s rivers.

The mountain’s elevation — and the resulting levels of rain — determines the type of forest. Mulanje’s lower slopes feature mostly miombo woodlands. Higher up, appearing in dark green, are afromontane forests, dense vegetation dominated by African conifers of the genus Podocarpus and Afrocarpus. The upper elevations also feature clusters of the endangered Mulanje cypress (Widdringtonia whytei), Malawi’s national tree.

Landsat 8’s latest pictures of Malanje, captured in October, also features evidence of a forest fire.

“Fires are frequent and a bad sign, often set by illegal loggers,” field researcher Joy Hecht, an environmental economist and consultant, told NASA. “The mountain top is a protected forest, and there would not be prescribed burns there.”