Global atmospheric concentrations of methane are rising—along with scientific scrutiny of this potent greenhouse gas. In March 2016, we published a feature story that took a broad look at why methane matters. Since that story came out, several new studies have been published. But first, some broader context from that feature story… The long-term, global trend for […]
Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The July 2016 puzzler is above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us what part of the world we are looking at, when the image was acquired, what the image shows, and why the scene is interesting. How to answer. Your answer can be […]
Congratulations to Dan Mahr for being the first to solve our May puzzler. As Dan pointed out: “These are wind turbines, probably viewed from Landsat 8 OLI. The shadows of some turbines are visible from the diagonal roads connecting them.” Indeed, the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8 captured this image of the Camp Springs […]
1) In most of the world, water hyacinth (Eichhonria crassipes) — a fast-growing, aquatic plant — is loathed for its ability to reproduce so quickly that it can blanket large portions of lakes and ponds with a thick mat of vegetation. 2) In a lake with strongly entrenched water hyacinth, plants interlock into such dense […]
Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The May 2016 puzzler is above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us what part of the world we are looking at, when the image was acquired, what the image shows, and why the scene is interesting. How to answer. Your answer can be […]
Readers were quick to name the Caspian Sea as the location featured in our April 2016 puzzler. It took just a bit longer to puzzle out what caused the curious lines that crisscross the image. Are they gouges on the seafloor produced by trawling? Or are they are related to the movement of marine animals? Those […]
Earth Matters occasionally publishes interviews with earth scientists from around NASA. Here we feature Santiago Gassó, research associate at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. What is most interesting about your role at Goddard? I am a physicist and work in atmospheric science, with a specialty in remote sensing. I use data from satellites to look at Earth’s atmosphere, […]
Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The April 2016 puzzler is above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us what part of the world we are looking at, when the image was acquired, what the image shows, and why the scene is interesting. How to answer. Your answer can be a […]
No, that is not a photograph of the death star orbiting Earth. It is the winner of NASA Earth Observatory’s 2016 Tournament Earth—the Dark Side and the Bright Side. The image shows the fully illuminated far side of the Moon that is not visible from Earth. The images were acquired by the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera […]
