Check our Hurricane Sandy event page, our YouTube page, and NASA’s Hurricane Resource page for the latest storm images from NASA. NASA hurricane researcher Owen Kelley prepared this image and caption. The day before Hurricane Sandy’s center was forecast to make landfall in New Jersey, the radar on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite observed […]
When you look at a parcel of Earth’s surface at a moment in time, it can be hard to grasp the story behind the image. It’s a snapshot, a fleeting glimpse. Does it always look like that? Am I seeing this place on a normal day, an abnormal day, an everyday? Where’s the motion, the […]
The Pole Creek fire is hardly breaking news. As of October 20, 2012, authorities announced that the blaze was 100 percent contained. In early October, when we first published this image that the Terra satellite acquired in September, the fire was still burning wildly and sending up smoke plumes that shrouded the Three Sisters and […]
As part of Earth Science Week, various NASA scientists and staff have been writing and talking about what it is like to work in science. One of those staff members is our colleague, Jefferson Beck, a documentary producer turned NASA science communicator… So I’m flying at 1,500 feet above a giant crack in the Pine […]
October 14–20 is Earth Science Week. This annual celebration started in 1998, established by the American Geosciences Institute to help children, students, and the general public understand how geoscientists collect information about our planet. In 2012, the theme is “Discovering Careers in the Earth Sciences” and involves activities by NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Park Service, […]
Congratulations to Britton, Dakota Steve, Alev Akyildiz, and Eric Jeffrey for being the first readers to solve the October puzzler. We posted the image on Tuesday afternoon, and by Wednesday morning Britton had worked out that the location was Mount Uludoruk in the southeastern Taurus Mountains. Later on, Dakota Steve added that it must have been taken […]
Every month, NASA Earth Observatory will offer up a puzzling satellite image here on Earth Matters. The fifth 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. How to answer. […]
Congratulations to Carl Schardt, Conan Witzel, and David Haycock for being some of our first readers to work out that the September puzzler showed part of Queensland’s Channel Country. Carl quickly recognized it was the Simpson Desert, but it took Conan and David a few days to pinpoint the exact area shown. If you missed […]
In mid-September 2012, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) announced that Arctic sea ice had reached a new record minimum — 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles). The previous record low came in September 2007 at 4.17 million square kilometers (1.61 million square miles). The 1979–2000 average minimum ice extent was […]
On September 16, 2012, the extent of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean dropped to 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles). The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) issued a preliminary announcement on September 19 noting that it was likely the minimum extent for the year and the lowest extent observed in […]
