The fertile green territory of Egypt's Nile Delta provides a notable contrast to the bare desert of the Sinai Peninsula in this Envisat view.
Only 2.5% of Egypt's land area is suitable for agriculture, corresponding to the Nile Valley and Delta. These low-lying floodplains are some of the oldest intensively cultivated areas on Earth, supporting up to 1600 inhabitants per square kilometre.
This 14 February 2005 image was acquired by Envisat's Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS), working in Full Resolution Mode with a spatial resolution of 300 metres and width of 670 km.