Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The June 2025 puzzler is shown above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us where it is, what we are looking at, ...

Source: Astronaut photograph ISS061-E-138244 / Earth Observatory On January 12-13, 2020, Taal Volcano erupted for the first time in more than four decades. On January 22, ash plumes again emanated ...

After our adventures in Quebec and Greenland, it was now time for our last stop in this intense season of fieldwork. This time we were heading to the Canadian Northwest Territories (NWT).

This is a remote place. The site is protected by a thousand kilometers of ice in nearly all directions, and the only ways to get here are by air or by boat for a couple of months of the year, when the ...

The prevention of Rift Valley fever in Kenya in 2016 was a success story decades in the making. Twenty years ago, predicting a disease outbreak seemed like the realm of science fiction. But today, ...

Night Vision for Weather Forecasters The original motivation for making low-light Earth observations was practical: military meteorologists wanted to track clouds and storms, smoke plumes, and dust ...

A Global View of Glaciers Glaciers are rivers of frozen ice, fed by snowfall at high-latitude or high-altitude locations that stay cool year round. Some glaciers slide off the edges of giant ice ...

From their home on the International Space Station, astronauts have a view unlike anything most of us will ever see. Over 20 years, they have shot millions of photographs of Earth, and it is not just ...

For the past two centuries, two trends have been steady and clear around the United States. Sea level has been rising, and more people have been moving closer to the coast. As the ocean has warmed, ...

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 ...

Lonar Crater, India India’s Lonar Crater began causing confusion soon after it was identified. Lonar Crater sits inside the Deccan Plateau—a massive plain of volcanic basalt rock leftover from ...

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