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 ...

At least as far back as King David’s psalms and Isaiah’s prophecies, snow has been characterized as a symbol of purity. “Lawn [linen] as white as driven snow” was how Shakespeare once described it.

The animation at the top of this page shows a wide view of Pine Island Glacier (PIG) and the long-term retreat of its ice front. Images were acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging ...

If you want to set up a scientific station at the bottom of the world, who would you send? Eighteen “crazy men and a dog,” of course. The men were a collection of engineers, scientists, and support ...

Since 1999, Earth Observatory has published 16,000+ images. To celebrate our 20th anniversary and the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, we want you to pick our all-time best image.Each week from March 23 ...

Swirling white clouds, deep blue oceans, and multicolored landscapes come to life on the pages of NASA’s new photo essay Earth, a collection of dramatic images captured by satellites.. Producer: ...

Bastiaanssen then set his eyes on the other extreme: he found nearly the coldest pixel in the thermal data. (The coldest pixels, says Allen, are usually standing water or data artifacts.) Since ...

Importance of phytoplankton The food web. Phytoplankton are the foundation of the aquatic food web, the primary producers, feeding everything from microscopic, animal-like zooplankton to multi-ton ...

Many ancient and medieval cultures believed the stars and the planets rotated around a fixed Earth. The complex motions of the planets—which sometimes move backwards across the sky (retrograde motion, ...

The most valuable fossils found in sediment cores are from tiny animals with a calcium carbonate shell, called foraminifera. One species of foraminifera lives in the icy waters of the Arctic above ...

Each summer, monsoon rains sweep across southwestern Asia, soaking India and Bangladesh. In nearby Pakistan, the rains are usually less intense, more intermittent, and centered in the northeast. The ...

Kathryn Hansen is the managing editor for NASA Earth Observatory. She has been writing stories, producing videos, and editing content for the group since 2014. Prior to joining Earth Observatory, ...