Scambos and his colleagues had created the Mosaic of Antarctica map by layering hundreds of digital images of Antarctica taken by Aqua and Terra MODIS between late 2003 and early 2004. To help Fricker ...

Even after the monsoon rains subsided, waters retreated much more slowly than they had advanced. Months after the rains stopped, crops, homes, businesses, and entire towns were still submerged. In ...

Antarctic Sea Ice The Antarctic is in some ways the opposite of the Arctic. The Arctic is an ocean basin surrounded by land, with the sea ice corralled in the coldest, darkest part of the Northern ...

Arctic sea ice occupies an ocean basin mostly enclosed by land. Because there is no landmass at the North Pole, sea ice extends all the way to the pole, making the ice subject to the most extreme ...

Forged in the heart of aging stars, carbon is the fourth most abundant element in the Universe. Most of Earth’s carbon—about 65,500 billion metric tons—is stored in rocks. The rest is in the ocean, ...

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 effects are surprisingly potent. “Dust on the snowpack of the Colorado River Basin can shorten the duration of snow cover by 21 to 51 days,” Painter says. “For comparison, if you kept the snow ...

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 ...

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 ...

Then came the International Geophysical Year (IGY). Scientists from around the world designated the period from July 1957 through December 1958 to be a time for international collaborative efforts to ...

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 ...