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 ...

Earth’s climate is determined by a delicate balance between how much of the Sun’s radiative energy is absorbed in the atmosphere and at the surface and how much thermal infrared radiation Earth emits ...

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 ...

Bridging the Data Gap “IceBridge exists because we need to understand how much ice the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will contribute to sea level rise over the next couple of decades,” says ...

Methane makes up just 0.00018 percent of the atmosphere, compared to 0.039 percent for carbon dioxide. (CO 2 is roughly 200 times more abundant.) Yet scientists attribute about one-sixth of recent ...

Modern scientific tools have allowed us to observe and explain disease in ways that may have astounded Hippocrates. But explaining why some disease outbreaks have seasonal cycles, and predicting the ...

In the 1980s, scientists began to realize that ozone-depleting chemicals, such as chlorofluorocarbon (CFCs), were creating a thin spot—a hole—in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Through an ...

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 ...

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 ...

Why does the difference matter? When we see a photo where the colors are brightened or altered, we think of it as artful (at best) or manipulated (at worst). We also have that bias when we look at ...