Earthscapes Stamps: See World in New Way

This Earthscapes issuance offers stamp customers an opportunity to see the world in a new way. This stamp pane presents examples of three categories of earthscapes: natural, agricultural, and urban. The photographs were all created high above the planet’s surface, either snapped by “eyes in the sky” — satellites orbiting the Earth — or carefully composed by photographers in aircraft.
In these first five designs representing natural earthscapes, we fly over America’s stunning wilderness. While a volcanic eruption scars the forests of Washington State, fog drifts over the timeless sandstone towers of Utah’s Monument Valley. In Alaska, a wide stripe that looks like a highway is actually a glacier, an immense conveyer belt of ice. At its base, jagged white shards resembling broken glass are really icebergs, bobbing in a lake. At Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park, a thin gray ribbon marks the boardwalk where visitors gape at one of the largest hot springs in the world, a steaming cauldron of water 370 feet in diameter. And on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, a shallow creek winds through Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge.