For the second year in a row, an image from the Canary Islands took the championship of Tournament: Earth. In 2013, a submarine volcano near El Hierro Island was the crowd favorite. This year, it was a shot of the entire island chain that dominated the vote. When “Trailing the Canaries” faced “Activity at Kliuchevskoi” in […]
Last week I had the privilege of helping judge the 22nd Malofiej Awards. Presented by the Spanish Chapter of the Society for News Design, Malofiej 22 recognized the best news infographics of 2013. (For the uninitiated, infographics aren’t limited to those posters illustrating tenuously related facts with a handful of pie charts. A good infographic […]
I thought the March Puzzler would be an easy one, but it turned out to be one of the more difficult we’ve posted. As explained in our March 29, 2014, Image of the Day, the image shows Nalabana Bird Sanctuary in India’s Chilika Lake. Despite more than 50 guesses on Earth Matters and 500 on Facebook, […]
On March 25, 2014, we published this nadir view of debris and a barrier lake created by a major landslide near Oso, Washington; the image was acquired by the Landsat 8 satellite on March 23. While top-down satellite views are Earth Observatory’s specialty, such images can be challenging to interpret because of how foreign the […]
Every month we offer a puzzling satellite image here on Earth Matters. The March 2014 puzzler is above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us what the image shows, what part of the world we are looking at, when the image was acquired, and why the scene is interesting. How to answer. Your answer […]
How is your bracket looking after the opening round of Tournament Earth? Unsurprisingly, top seeds Global Toll of Particulate Pollution (56.2 percent of votes), Snow Across Great Britain (50.7 percent), and Liege at Night (54.7) all dispatched weaker opponents in the first round of competition. The notable exception among the top seeds was Air Quality […]
I hope your brackets are ready because polls for round one of Tournament Earth close today at 4 p.m EST/9 p.m. UTC. Second round voting will open on Monday at 9 a.m. EST/ 1 p.m. UTC). Also, stay tuned for occasional posts on Earth Matters with details about how images fared in the competition. The images […]
This is not a mine, military base, salt farm, or solar plant. As explained in our March 2, 2014, Image of the Day, this is a date orchard near the Orange River in Northern Cape, South Africa. Thanks to all of you who weighed in our February 2014 puzzler. Reader JMR was first to identify […]
On February 27, 2014, we published an Image of the Day of the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite soaring above Tanegashima Space Center like a candle in the sky. However, that wasn’t the only spectacular photograph of the night launch that chief NASA photographer Bill Ingalls (@ingallsimages) captured. I collected a few of my favorites below, and […]
Most years, the Swiss Air Force hosts an air show in the fall that sends planes roaring over the Axalp-Ebenfluh firing range near Brienz, Switzerland. Spectators often congregate at the Axalp, a resort area on a terrace that overlooks Brienz from an elevation of about 1,500 meters (4,900 feet). While waiting for the 2013 show […]
