Image of the Day for May 13, 2026

Beaver Island is one in a string of verdant and scenic jewels in a northern Lake Michigan archipelago.

May 13, 2026

View more Images of the Day:

In a process that played out over thousands of years, a retreating ice sheet carved, scoured, and shaped the landscape of the present-day Great Lakes. In northern Lake Michigan, this sculpting left distinct ridges and valleys running north-to-south along the lake floor. Some parts of those ridges, made of erosion-resistant rock, have remained above the waves of the big lake, forming the Beaver Archipelago.

The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 captured this image of several of the archipelago’s islands on August 2, 2024. These patches of land contain upland forests , dunes, wetlands, and marshes—habitats that support rare plant and bird species and provide spawning grounds for fish.…