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

Update on May 27, 2025: This springtime Landsat image shows snow-covered tundra streaked with wind-blown sediment near Utqiaġvik, Alaska, the northernmost city in the United States. Congratulations to ...

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 ...

I have sailed with my share of compelling characters since I began ocean research, and perhaps it is fitting that while we study ocean color aboard the R/V Falkor, I have had the pleasure of getting ...

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).

This is a remote place. The site is protected by a thousand kilometers of ice in nearly all directions, and the only ways to get here are by air or by boat for a couple of months of the year, when the ...

Night Vision for Weather Forecasters The original motivation for making low-light Earth observations was practical: military meteorologists wanted to track clouds and storms, smoke plumes, and dust ...

A Global View of Glaciers Glaciers are rivers of frozen ice, fed by snowfall at high-latitude or high-altitude locations that stay cool year round. Some glaciers slide off the edges of giant ice ...

From their home on the International Space Station, astronauts have a view unlike anything most of us will ever see. Over 20 years, they have shot millions of photographs of Earth, and it is not just ...

From their perch on the International Space Station, astronauts have spent twenty years sharing a story about Earth as they can see it from above. Like the directors of any film, those astronaut ...

Why does the difference matter? When we see a photo where the colors are brightened or altered, we think of it as artful (at best) or manipulated (at worst). We also have that bias when we look at ...

The Blue Marble Using a collection of satellite images and data, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of Earth’s land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a ...