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

Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The July 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: This Landsat 9 image shows an island group and its surrounding waters off mainland Mozambique. Congratulations to Mark for being the first reader to identify the location and to Yaakov ...

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

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

Astronaut and scientist Piers Sellers is no longer with us, but his words still resonate. A posthumous plea from Sellers arrived in July 2018 in the form of an article in PNAS. The topic was one that ...

Figure 1: The Arctic Ocean with the midnight sun shining above. We learned in school that plants take in CO2 and water and use light to drive photosynthesis to grow. But what you may not know is that ...

A few decades ago, the idea of predicting a disease outbreak via satellite was science fiction. But today, researchers can use environmental data to predict when and where some diseases are likely to ...

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 ...

Giant kelp forests are among Earth’s most productive habitats, but they are ephemeral. Researchers are using Landsat and a host of online friends to figure out where the forests are growing and ...

For centuries, if archaeologists wanted to find an ancient or mythical site, they trudged through desert sands or rainforest thickets armed with little more than rumors and hand-drawn maps. They ...

Scientists are using novel measurements of gravity to gather indispensable information about Earth’s water supplies. The GRACE mission can see water flowing underground.