A string of dry years shriveled vegetation in Africa's Sahel, causing some to fear that the Sahara Desert was shifting south. Satellite data spanning more than twenty years now shows that the Sahel is ...

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

As the Earth heats up more water will make its way into the atmosphere, trapping even heat near the surface. To predict how much temperatures could rise in the future, scientists are working to ...

If Earth’s oceans are soaking up the excess heat energy caused by greenhouse gases, then exactly what is the problem? The problem—and perhaps part of the solution as well—is thermal inertia. Inertia ...

These shifts in species composition may be benign, or they may result in a cascade of negative consequences throughout the marine food web. Accurate global mapping of phytoplankton taxonomic groups is ...

While poking around the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth (tens of thousands of photos of Earth from space, dating back to the Mercury program) I found this photo of the Milky Way rising ...

Updated Oct 23, 2009 World of Change: El Niño, La Niña, and Rainfall. For many people, El Niño and La Niña mean floods or drought, but the events are actually a warming or cooling of the eastern ...

Importance of phytoplankton The food web. Phytoplankton are the foundation of the aquatic food web, the primary producers, feeding everything from microscopic, animal-like zooplankton to multi-ton ...

Many ancient and medieval cultures believed the stars and the planets rotated around a fixed Earth. The complex motions of the planets—which sometimes move backwards across the sky (retrograde motion, ...

On a hot, sunny afternoon, walk outside and find a parking lot bordered by grass. Put one hand on the asphalt and the other on the grass. The same surfaces of asphalt, stone, brick, and cement that ...

But, Rignot notes, scientists just got some better climbing shoes. The mission known as IceBridge carries an array of instruments on airplanes to obtain the most complete picture of Earth’s ice cover ...

More Lawns than Irrigated Corn : Although there was little in the way of published research on estimating U.S. lawn area, the research group Milesi was studying and working with at the University of ...