Since its creation in late April 1999, NASA Earth Observatory has published more than 15,000 image-driven stories about our planet: natural- and false-color satellite images, data maps, and aerial or ...

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 ...

Since its launch in February 2013, Landsat 8 has collected about 400 scenes of the Earth’s surface per day. Each of these scenes covers an area of about 185 by 185 kilometers (115 by 115 miles)—34,200 ...

Updated Sep 9, 2024 World of Change: Columbia Glacier, Alaska Since 1980, the volume of this glacier that spills into the Prince William Sound has shrunk by half. Climate change may have nudged the ...

Desertification. The word invokes images of sand dunes blowing over abandoned farms as some irresistible, dark force steadily transforms fertile fields into inhospitable wasteland. The United Nations’ ...

When scientists started to analyze the paleoclimate evidence in the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores, they found that the record also supported Milankovitch’s theory of when ice ages should occur.

“There’s a debate about how cities affect rainfall,” Shepherd answers. “There are several hypotheses about what is going on, but they primarily involve the urban land use and urban aerosols.” The ...

In 1967 Hansen went to work for NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York City, where he continued his research on planetary problems. Around 1970, some scientists suspected Earth was ...

Throughout its long history, Earth has warmed and cooled time and again. Climate has changed when the planet received more or less sunlight due to subtle shifts in its orbit, as the atmosphere or ...

In 2011, scientists from North Carolina, France, and Peru saw that deforestation in a portion of the Amazon rainforest was proceeding at an unusual pace in an unexpected place. Images from the Landsat ...

Welcome, teachers, to Mission: Biomes! This site was designed for teachers to use in classrooms as a supplementary, interdisciplinary unit. Mission: Biomes is especially appropriate for grades 3 ...

The Antarctic ozone hole in 2016 was not exactly remarkable. But each year, we publish an annual update because, when strung together over time, the series shows the unparalleled success of the ...