The silver serpent winding through southern Utah is Lake Powell, not an exposed riverbed. Its metallic shine comes from sunglint: sunlight reflected from the reservoir toward a camera aboard the International Space Station.
What is the silver serpent in the image?
It is Lake Powell, the reservoir on the Colorado River within Glen Canyon. The view is a mosaic assembled from astronaut photographs captured in 2016. Live Science identifies the lake in the image and attributes the sunglint explanation to NASA Earth Observatory. The winding outline belongs to the reservoir; the silver pattern is light reflecting off its surface.
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Lake Powell lies in southern Utah, roughly 70 miles (110 km) southwest of Moab, and extends toward the Grand Canyon in Arizona, according to Live Science.
Why does the water look metallic?
NASA Earth Observatory defines sunglint as light reflected directly from a surface—usually water—toward a viewer or a camera or satellite sensor. In this image, sunlight reflects from Lake Powell toward the ISS camera, producing the bright, silvery appearance.
Water does not reflect light uniformly. A smoother surface and wind-roughened water send light in different directions, so the amount reflected toward the camera varies across the lake. Those variations create contrasting bright and dark areas. The serpentine shape is the reservoir’s course; sunglint is the shifting brightness laid over it.
How Lake Powell changed Glen Canyon
Lake Powell formed after Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1966. The Live Science feature reports that water levels rose around 200 feet (60 meters) over the following two decades. That is a historical account of the reservoir’s filling, not a current measurement of lake level or storage.
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The reservoir submerged parts of the canyon explored by John Wesley Powell. NASA’s astronaut-photography collection describes portions of that Glen Canyon landscape as later covered by Lake Powell: NASA Earth Observatory: Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. The image therefore shows the reservoir occupying a canyon landscape, not a drought-exposed canyon floor.
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The Live Science feature describes The Rincon as a former loop of the Colorado River, up to about 3 miles (5 km) across. It says the river’s course was bypassed after a canyon collapse. That account is specific to the feature; it should not be read as evidence that the loop is newly exposed in the astronaut image.
Music Temple is another named Glen Canyon feature the article identifies as submerged beneath Lake Powell. Together, these place names point to the older canyon landscape now covered by the reservoir.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.The canyon before the reservoir
John Wesley Powell, the explorer who traveled the Colorado River and wrote Canyons of the Colorado, described the canyon’s changing scenery: “Past these towering monuments, past these mounded billows of orange sandstone, past these oak-set glens, past these fern-decked alcoves, past these mural curves, we glide hour after hour, stopping now and then, as our attention is arrested by some new wonder,” as quoted by Live Science.
That recollection evokes the canyon’s terrain; the silver serpent image captures Lake Powell’s present-day water surface under a particular reflection of sunlight.
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