Though mosquitoes are small, they are also deadly. Mosquito bites result in the deaths of more than 725,000 people each year—more than any other animal. That compares to about 50,000 deaths from ...

Sure, space may be silent, or at least absent the sound waves that human ears can hear. But put that aside for a moment, and try to imagine the sound of a satellite orbiting hundreds of miles above ...

This blog post is the first in a series to come. Our team, the Climate & Ecosystems Change research group from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, is working in collaboration with the Environmental ...

In the process of researching a feature for the Earth Observatory, I always come across fascinating tidbits that just don’t quite fit into my article. For instance, there’s this great carbon ...

Earth’s climate is determined by a delicate balance between how much of the Sun’s radiative energy is absorbed in the atmosphere and at the surface and how much thermal infrared radiation Earth emits ...

Blast From the Past: A Modern Lake in an Ancient Crater Famously visible from space, ring-shaped Manicouagan Lake was filled at the dawn of the Space Age when Canada dammed a river to flood a Triassic ...

Since its creation in late April 1999, NASA Earth Observatory has published more than 15,000 image-driven stories about our planet: natural- and false-color satellite images, data maps, and aerial or ...

The Water Cycle and Climate Change Among the most serious Earth science and environmental policy issues confronting society are the potential changes in the Earth’s water cycle due to climate change.

We are kicking off 2025 with much to look forward to but also much to look back on. In 2024, over 7.5 million readers visited our website to read our stories, and many millions more viewed our imagery ...

Even after the monsoon rains subsided, waters retreated much more slowly than they had advanced. Months after the rains stopped, crops, homes, businesses, and entire towns were still submerged. In ...

Since its launch in February 2013, Landsat 8 has collected about 400 scenes of the Earth’s surface per day. Each of these scenes covers an area of about 185 by 185 kilometers (115 by 115 miles)—34,200 ...