Each month at the Earth Observatory, we publish a new satellite puzzler to challenge your remote sensing and image interpretation skills. But this December, a bit of mirth and mischief got into us. (“I could say ‘Elves,’ but it’s not elves really…”) See, we have this great new image gallery — Reading the ABCs from […]
November Puzzler Answer: The Mackenzie River
The November 2015 puzzler turned out to perplex many of our readers. That’s no surprise; the scene shows less than 20 kilometers of Canada’s longest river—the Mackenzie. The Mackenzie River flows for more than 4,000 kilometers, and drains a basin that spans one-fifth of Canada’s total land area. Each year, the Mackenzie delivers about 325 […]
Fires in Indonesia: Perspective from the Ground
Cassie Freund is the program director of the Gunung Palung Orangutan Conservation Program, an orangutan protection project in Indonesia. While working on our latest feature story, we asked her what life was like in West Kalimantan during the 2015 fire season, when smoke blanketed parts of Borneo and Sumatra. Peat deposits, El Niño weather, and agricultural activity converged to […]
Quotes Tennyson, Loves Wildlife, and Makes Pretty Pictures for NASA
Earth Observatory has a pretty small staff — seven people — for a daily publication. There are a lot of other folks inside and outside of NASA who help us find and tell stories, but one man stands out from the rest. We might not be able to bring you a new Image of the Day, […]


