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 […]
By Eric Lindstrom Channel fever: an unusual excitement or restlessness common among a ship’s crew when the ship nears port after a voyage (The term probably refers to the English Channel, between southern England and northern France.) Now that all the oceanography is done, it’s four days of steaming to the Azores. During that time […]
By Eric Lindstrom When on land, an oceanography brain usually associates the term ocean motion with the movement of seawater in the form of ocean currents. However, when actually on the ocean, the biggest signal for our oceanography brains to cope with is the role of ocean motion in the pitch and roll of the […]
By Eric Lindstrom How do you spell physical oceanography? I know my answer for that question! It’s easy: CTD. For about the last 40 years, the mainstay of physical oceanography has been profiling the ocean with sensors for Conductivity, Temperature, and Depth (CTD). The SPURS cruise is no exception. These are key properties to derive […]
By Eric Lindstrom Friday, 5 October 2012 — We got a call today from the Commander of the International Space Station (ISS), Sunita “Suni” Williams. Suni, who was calling while the ISS was passing over Eastern Russia, wanted to congratulate us on our SPURS expedition. We had 30 minutes of wide-ranging conversation about life at […]
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. […]
By Eric Lindstrom A team of scientists from University of Washington is focusing on long-term observations in SPURS region with autonomous instruments: Argo floats (Drs. Stephen C. Riser, Jeffrey Nystuen, and student Jessica Anderson), Seagliders (Drs. Craig Lee, Charlie Eriksen, and Luc Rainville), and Lagrangian floats (Drs. Eric D’Asaro and Andrey Shcherbina). Their sentinel instruments […]
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 […]
