When I first saw this beautiful remote sensing image, I couldn’t help but feel that I was looking at a painting by an abstract expressionist.

Starting in the 1940s, abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollack and Clyfford Still “valued spontaneity and improvisation, and they accorded the highest importance to process,” writes Stella Paul of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

These artists placed “an emphasis on dynamic, energetic gesture,” she notes. Their works also were primarily a