This week’s Earth Indicator is 4 million…as in 4 million square kilometers. It’s a number that scientists studying sea ice never thought they would see. Every year, the sea ice at the top of our planet shrinks and grows with the seasons. But because ocean water lags behind the atmosphere in warming up and cooling […]
NASA Earth Observatory writer Adam Voiland spoke with Columbia University climatologist Richard Seager about the widespread drought currently affecting North America. The current dry spell has been called a “flash drought.” Has it really come on that quickly or as a surprise? No, I wouldn’t say it has been a surprise to those of […]
Read our recent Image of the Day to find out more about the Yanqi Basin, the answer to August’s puzzler. Congratulations to Yiannis Raftopoulos for being the first to identify the location. We posted the mystery image on Monday at 6:17 p.m. and on our social media accounts on Tuesday morning. Within minutes of appearing […]
Every month, NASA Earth Observatory will offer up a puzzling satellite image here on Earth Matters. The third puzzler is above. Your challenge is to use the comments section below to tell us what part of the world we’re looking at, when the image was acquired, and what’s happening in the scene. Bonus points if […]
Is that a three omicron? Nope. Three, rho? Strike two. Our latest Earth Indicator is three-sigma. In Greek, sigma (σ) is the 18th letter of the alphabet. In statistics, it’s a symbol for standard deviation, a measure of how spread out a set of data points are from the average (which is often called the […]
Earlier this week, as India endured the worst blackout in its history, many readers and members of the media asked us to show the vast country without lights. Just a few weeks ago, Earth Observatory showed the world what the Mid-Atlantic United States looked like before and after a massive storm-induced blackout. (We also showed […]
