Earth from Space: Land of giants

The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains.

Zoom in to explore this image at its full 10 m resolution or click on the circles to learn more.

The area pictured here shows the southern Sierra Nevada, a large mountain range in western North America that runs along the eastern edge of California. The region is defined by dramatic changes in height, ranging from about 418 m in the foothills to over 4400 m at Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the United States outside of Alaska, visible in the top right of the image.

The image showcases a big part of the Sequoia National Park to the south and a smaller portion of the Kings Canyon National Park to the north. Since this image was captured in December 2024, both parks are largely blanketed in snow.

The two parks are next to each other and managed as one national park, which encompasses a vast area of about 3500 sq km. Sequoia National Park covers approximately 1630 sq km and Kings Canyon about 1870 sq km.

The parks’ diverse landscape feature huge mountains, rugged foothills, deep canyons, vast caverns and dense conifer forests filled with groves of giant sequoias. Giant sequoias are among the world’s largest and oldest trees and grow only on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada between 900 and 2600 m.

The largest sequoia, known as the General Sherman Tree, is about 84 m tall, has a trunk over 30 m in circumference and is thought to be up to 2700 years old. It stands in a section of the Sequoia National Park, called the Giant Forest, visible in the top left corner of the image.

Forests, often called ‘Earth’s green lungs’, are a crucial part of Earth’s carbon cycle, since they absorb and store large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere each year – thereby helping to keep our planet cool and regulate the climate.

However, the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and forest degradation, particularly in tropical regions, are causing stored carbon to be released back into the atmosphere, exacerbating climate change.

ESA’s upcoming forest mission, Biomass, set for launch at the end of April 2025, will provide new insight into the state of our forests and how they are changing, and further our knowledge of the role forests play in the carbon cycle, and hence in the climate system.