Earth Matters

Congratulations to Dillion and Eric J.F. Kelijssen for solving the January Puzzler the fastest.  The answer is Oobloyah Valley on Canada’s Ellesmere Island. The image features four glaciers—Nukapingwa, Arklio, Perkeo, and Midget—flowing into the valley from the Krieger mountains to the north. At the end of each glacier, all of which are retreating, there are […]

A connection to deep waters to the north gives a trench near the Bahamas the shape of a tongue.

Every month we offer a puzzling satellite image here on Earth Matters. The January 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 […]

Every month we offer a puzzling satellite image here on Earth Matters. Every month someone seems to figure it out quickly. So in December 2013, we threw down the gauntlet. For the first time, we put a false-color image—this swirl of purple and pink—into play. A week later, we have received many thoughtful responses but no […]

Las imágenes de satélite son como los mapas: están llenas de información útil e interesante, siempre y cuando tengas una clave. Éstas nos pueden mostrar cuánto ha cambiado una ciudad, cuán bien están creciendo nuestros cultivos, dónde arde un fuego o cuando se acerca una tormenta. Para revelar la riqueza de información en una imagen […]

Every month we offer a puzzling satellite image here on Earth Matters. Every month someone seems to figure it out quickly. We are feeling like it is time to throw down some gauntlets. The December 2013 puzzler is above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us what the image shows, what part of […]

It’s that Time of Year Monarch butterflies congregate in central Mexico every winter. Sandhill cranes stop  at a small section of the Platte River in Nebraska every spring. And earth and planetary scientists congregate in San Francisco each December. More than ten thousand people converged on Moscone Center this week for the the fall meeting […]

Happy 15th Birthday, International Space Station! The first International Space Station component, the Russian Zarya module, was launched in November 1998. In the years since, NASA and its global partners have built a world-class orbiting laboratory and kept a continuous human presence in space since 2000. I decided to celebrate the occasion by searching through the […]

Last week, a city-state sized chunk of ice broke off of Pine Island Glacier (PIG), sending iceberg B-31 into a bay off West Antarctica. Though the formation of the 700 square-kilometer iceberg could be a purely natural event — the result of a floating ice tongue growing too long and losing its balance on the sea — […]