Stock Photo - Landsat satellite imagery reveals that in the last 10 years, wetlands that once covered as much as 20,000 square km 7,725 square miles in parts of Iraq and Iran have been reduced to about 15 percent of their original size. Through the damming and siphoning off of waters from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the ecosystem has been decimated and, as a result, a number of plant and animal species face possible extinction.The top image is a false_color composite made from data collected by the Multi_Spectral Scanner MSS aboard Landsat from 1973_76. Four Landsat scenes were stitched together to make an image of the whole region. In this scene, dense marsh vegetation mainly phragmites, or marsh grass appears as dark red patches. The elongated red patches along the banks of the Shatt_al_Arab River are Date Palm groves. The Shatt_al_Arab begins where the Tigris and Euphrates meet and carries their waters southeastward into the Persian Gulf.The middle image shows the state of the marshlands on September 7, 1990, shortly after the Iran_Iraq war. This image was acquired by the MSS aboard Landsat 5. The scene reveals that a large eastern swath of the Central and Al Hammar Marshes as well as the northwestern and southern fringes of the Al Hawizeh Marsh the large red areas immediately above and below the Euphrates River, running west to east toward the bottom of this scene had dried out as a result of causeways constructed to ease military transport in otherwise difficult terrain.The bottom image is a false_color composite of data from the Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus ETM+, acquired on March 26 and May 4, 2000. In this scene, most of the Central Marshes appear as olive to greyish_brown patches indicating low vegetation cover on moist to dry ground. The very light to grey patches are areas of exposed ground with no vegetation, which may actually be salt flats where before there were lakes. The Al Hawizeh Marsh straddling the Iran_Iraq border just east of the Tigris River appears to be all that remains of the region´s natural wetlands, and it has been reduced in size by about half.Today, river flow into the Mesopotamian marshlands has been cut by 20_50 percent, and the spring floods that sustained the marshlands have been eliminated. The end result is what was once a lush wetland environment roughly the size of the state of New Jersey has been reduced by about 85 percent in area to roughly the size of the small island nation of the Bahamas. What was once a vast, interconnected mosaic of densely_vegetated marshlands and lakes, teeming with life, is now mostly lifeless desert and salt_encrusted lakebeds and riverbeds. For more information check out the Earth Observatory´s Image of the Day entitled Vanishing Marshes of Mesopotamia