The Earth Observatory shares images and stories about the environment, Earth systems, and climate that emerge from NASA research, satellite missions, and models.

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 ...

Sustaining Tropical Forests : Strategies for preserving tropical forests can operate on local to international scales. On a local scale, governments and non-governmental organizations are working with ...

Climate Close-up: Coral Reefs : The warm, shallow ocean waters of the tropics have talkative “forests” of their own. Brightly colored mounds of coral grow in the warm ocean waters, quickly when ...

On a hot, sunny afternoon, walk outside and find a parking lot bordered by grass. Put one hand on the asphalt and the other on the grass. The same surfaces of asphalt, stone, brick, and cement that ...

The Earth Observatory shares images and stories about the environment, Earth systems, and climate that emerge from NASA research, satellite missions, and models.

In principle, it should be possible to add up each of the individual components of sea level rise—melting continental ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, retreating glaciers, the thermal expansion ...

Sandy is not the only recent storm to make people ask questions about climate change and weather. In 2010, an epic winter storm dubbed “Snowmageddon” dumped more than half a meter (2 feet) of snow ...

Earth’s temperature depends on how much sunlight the land, oceans, and atmosphere absorb, and how much heat the planet radiates back to space. This fact sheet describes the net flow of energy through ...

Updated Oct 23, 2009 World of Change: El Niño, La Niña, and Rainfall. For many people, El Niño and La Niña mean floods or drought, but the events are actually a warming or cooling of the eastern ...

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, ...

Carbon flows between the atmosphere, land, and ocean in a cycle that encompasses nearly all life and sets the thermostat for Earth's climate. By burning fossil fuels, people are changing the carbon ...