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, ...

Update: This Landsat image shows dried lakes on the Tibetan plateau in 1994. Congratulations to David Alegre and James Varghese for being the first readers to identify the location. Read more about ...

We have been traversing the South Pacific for over thirty days now. Early on, we had several days of high winds and rough seas with waves that may have been as big as 8 meters (over 25 feet). The bow ...

Some 25 of us were up before 6 a.m. to head out on the bus from the hotel to Burlington International Airport to catch the C-130 aircraft, a military transport plane repurposed for NASA fieldwork, to ...

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, ...

The night side of Earth twinkles with light. The first thing to stand out is the cities. “Nothing tells us more about the spread of humans across the Earth than city lights,” asserts Chris Elvidge, a ...

Casey is one of the first scientists to use satellite data to distinguish between the different types of debris—ranging from fine-grained aerosols, to bits of volcanic ash, to the large rocks and ...

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 ...

From their perch on the space station, astronauts have spent 20 years sharing a story about Earth as they see it from above. Like the directors of a film, those astronaut storytellers have a crew ...

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 ...

Chances are, you have a camera near you as you read this—in the smart phone in your pocket or on the tablet or computer you’re using to view this page. Some of you might have a 35 mm film or digital ...

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