Earth has experienced climate change in the past without help from humanity. We know about past climates because of evidence left in tree rings, layers of ice in glaciers, ocean sediments, coral reefs ...

Goddard’s LiDAR, Hyperspectral, & Thermal Imager (G-LiHT) is an airborne instrument designed to map the composition of forested landscapes. The G-LiHT instrument has a number of sensors that each ...

If you follow Earth and climate science closely, you may have noticed that the media is abuzz every December and January with stories about how the past year ranked in terms of global temperatures.

Though blizzards and cold snaps may have made you forget the news from last week, 2015 was the warmest year in NASA’s global temperature record, which dates back to 1880. During a January 2016 press ...

Thirteen years ago, a satellite acquired this beautiful image (above) of light and sand playing off a portion of the ocean floor in the Bahamas. The caption that accompanied the image didn’t include ...

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In some parts of the world, saline lakes are common features. Take, for instance, the image below, from our January 2017 article about fires in Argentina. But saline lakes are an environment unto ...

Our first destination in Potrillo was Kilbourne Hole, a maar crater that was formed about 16,000 to 24,000 years ago. It’s an irregular hole measuring about 1-1/2 miles by 2 miles. Kilbourne is ...

A new fissure opened on the Reykjanes peninsula in southwestern Iceland near Grindavík in December 2023 and continued erupting throughout 2024. Whether sparked by lightning, intentional land-clearing, ...

When scientists started to analyze the paleoclimate evidence in the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores, they found that the record also supported Milankovitch’s theory of when ice ages should occur.

Desertification. The word invokes images of sand dunes blowing over abandoned farms as some irresistible, dark force steadily transforms fertile fields into inhospitable wasteland. The United Nations’ ...

Phytoplankton samples can be taken directly from the water at permanent observation stations or from ships. Sampling devices include hoses and flasks to collect water samples, and sometimes, plankton ...