Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The July 2025 puzzler is shown above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us where it is, what we are looking at, ...

Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The July 2025 puzzler is shown above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us where it is, what we are looking at, ...

The Earth Observatory shares images and stories about the environment, Earth systems, and climate that emerge from NASA research, satellite missions, and models.

Update: This Landsat 9 image shows an island group and its surrounding waters off mainland Mozambique. Congratulations to Mark for being the first reader to identify the location and to Yaakov ...

Update: This Landsat image shows dried lakes on the Tibetan plateau in 1994. Congratulations to David Alegre and James Varghese for being the first readers to identify the location. Read more about ...

Our team is back at South Pole Station after a highly successful 88S Traverse. We budgeted 16 to 19 days for the traverse, but we returned to station after just 15 days. Our science instrumentation ...

After our adventures in Quebec and Greenland, it was now time for our last stop in this intense season of fieldwork. This time we were heading to the Canadian Northwest Territories (NWT).

Some 25 of us were up before 6 a.m. to head out on the bus from the hotel to Burlington International Airport to catch the C-130 aircraft, a military transport plane repurposed for NASA fieldwork, to ...

A few decades ago, the idea of predicting a disease outbreak via satellite was science fiction. But today, researchers can use environmental data to predict when and where some diseases are likely to ...

Out of the Blue and Into the Black New Views of the Earth at Night The night is nowhere near as dark as most of us think. In fact, the Earth is never really dark. And we don’t have to be in the dark ...

For a short time after a snowfall, glaciers are like blank white canvases. But it’s not long before the snowy surfaces are painted over with coats of dust, soot, ash, pollen, salt, sand, rocks, and ...

For 20 years, astronauts have been shooting photos of Earth from the space station. Like everything the astronauts do, they are trained for this job. And like everything they do, there is purpose and ...