Maine has roughly 6,000 named lakes and ponds, more than any other state in New England. Many are natural, formed by glaciers scouring the land surface and disrupting drainage during past ice ages.
But a portion are reservoirs, created by the state’s roughly 1,000 dams. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that the state has 51 active hydroelectric dams. One of them—a dam and power station in Aroostook County—creates a reservoir that stands out in satellite imagery for appearing V-shaped.
The Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) on Landsat 9 captured this image of Scopan Lake on June 2, 2024. The western arm of the lake, which formed in the 1940s after a small dam was constructed near the town of Masardis, is shallower than the northern arm. The dam connected the western arm to an existing lake that now forms the reservoir’s northern arm. The deeper arm has a maximum depth exceeding 40 feet (12 meters), while the shallower arm reaches depths of only 10 to 20 feet (3 to 6 meters).
Northern hardwood forests, dense with maple, birch, ash, hemlock, and spruce, surround the lake. Gaps in the forest are mostly farmland, burned areas, or land that was cleared for timber. A sawmill is visible west of the lake. During the 1970s and 1980s, northern Maine suffered outbreaks of eastern spruce budworm, leading to the clearing of some infested parts of the forest.
The image was rotated northeast to emphasize the V-shape. It is one of dozens of letter-shaped features on Earth’s surface curated by NASA’s Landsat outreach team as part of an interactive tool that allows users to compose names or other words using Landsat images of Earth.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Wanmei Liang, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
