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 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 ...

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

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

Through a series of chemical reactions and tectonic activity, carbon takes between 100-200 million years to move between rocks, soil, ocean, and atmosphere in the slow carbon cycle. On average, 10 13 ...

If you have ever walked along the California coast, you’ve likely had to navigate around clumps of seaweed. Fathom this: before it was thrown up by the surf and left to dry on the beach, that seeming ...

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 ...

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 ...