This blog post is the first in a series to come. Our team, the Climate & Ecosystems Change research group from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, is working in collaboration with the Environmental ...

In the process of researching a feature for the Earth Observatory, I always come across fascinating tidbits that just don’t quite fit into my article. For instance, there’s this great carbon ...

On June 16, 1962, The New Yorker began publishing a serialized version of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. Spring would eventually turn silent, Carson warned, because widespread pesticide use was ...

Researchers have found that Earth’s energy imbalance approximately doubled during the 14-year period from 2005 to 2019. Earth’s climate is determined by a delicate balance between how much of the ...

This month we published a satellite image and map of the southern United States featuring the Black Belt Prairie—a crescent-shaped swath of land running through Mississippi and Alabama named for its ...

The problem is that the world’s ice isn’t behaving like anyone thought it would. Instead of a slow and steady melt as temperatures rise, glaciers are spitting out icebergs in many places, draining the ...

For a chemical compound that shows up nearly everywhere on the planet, methane still surprises us. It is one of the most potent greenhouse gases, and yet the reasons for why and where it shows up are ...

The night side of Earth twinkles with light. The first thing to stand out is the cities. “Nothing tells us more about the spread of humans across the Earth than city lights,” asserts Chris Elvidge, a ...

In January 2016 in Kenya, the conditions were just right for an outbreak of Rift Valley fever. A strong El Niño on the other side of the world had brought higher temperatures and a wetter-than-normal ...

The signature of drought was easy to read in the southern United States in the summer of 2011. It was in the brown, wilted crops and the bare fields. It was in the clouds of dust that rolled across ...

It was the summer of 1990 and broiling hot in southwest Oman. The small group spread out their sleeping bags on a desert mesa, under the setting Sun. They had not planned on stopping here for the ...

For many, the view is deeply humbling. “For the first time in my life, I saw the horizon as a curved line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light: the atmosphere,” said Ulf Merbold, a ...