Who knew that being a scientist could be as easy as pointing your phone at the sky? This month, NASA and the GLOBE Program are asking citizen scientists to take out their phones and report what kinds ...

Lake Chad’s Water, Wetlands, and Dunes Astronauts have photographed the diminishing lake in Central Africa for decades, most recently in January 2025, as its area remained just a fraction of its past ...

The Sun provides the energy that drives Earth’s climate, but not all of the energy that reaches the top of the atmosphere finds its way to the surface. That’s because aerosols—and clouds seeded by ...

Temperate deciduous forests are located in the mid-latitude areas which means that they are found between the polar regions and the tropics. The deciduous forest regions are exposed to warm and cold ...

The 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens — which began with a series of small earthquakes in mid-March and peaked with a cataclysmic flank collapse, avalanche, and explosion on May 18 — was not the largest ...

Spring is a time for blooming plants–and pollen. This image shows poppies blooming in California in Spring 2020. (Source: NASA Earth Observatory) Warm springtime temperatures signal shrub buds to ...

1) In most of the world, water hyacinth (Eichhonria crassipes) — a fast-growing, aquatic plant — is loathed for its ability to reproduce so quickly that it can blanket large portions of lakes and ...

Seven million years ago, some truly spectacular creatures roamed the woodlands of East Africa. There was a moose-like giraffe called Shiva’s beast. There were giant buffalo with horns wider than the ...

The Earth Observatory image of the day for June 5 shows flooding in Botswana’s Savuti River and Savuti Swamp. The abundant water turns out to be a very small part of a much bigger picture. The Savuti ...

Old-growth forests are vital because they capture large amounts of carbon and provide homes to hundreds of species. In the Eastern United States, trees in these minimally disturbed ecosystems tend to ...

For a chemical compound that shows up nearly everywhere on the planet, methane still surprises us. It is one of the most potent greenhouse gases, and yet the reasons for why and where it shows up are ...

The signature of drought was easy to read in the southern United States in the summer of 2011. It was in the brown, wilted crops and the bare fields. It was in the clouds of dust that rolled across ...