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 ...

Landsat 8 acquired this image of Mauna Loa on December 20, 2014. The CO2 observatory is located just north of the summit caldera. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/Landsat 8. Learn more about the image ...

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 ...

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 ...

If you want to see global warming’s signature, look to the Arctic. Up north, the air is warming and the ice is melting. As all of that reflective ice goes away, the Arctic Ocean is soaking up more ...

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 ...

Goooooooal!!!! The 2018 FIFA World Cup kicked off on June 14, 2018. Here’s a bit of Cup trivia you may not know. In 1962, NASA launched a small, spherical communications satellite called Telstar that ...

On the second science data acquisition flight of PALS (on June 12) I got to fly on board the Twin Otter aircraft for the flight segment after the mid-day refueling stop at Winnipeg airport. Due to 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Sea level rise is not just an academic concern for NASA satellites and scientists. With two-thirds of its infrastructure and assets situated on the coast, the agency has first-hand experience with the ...