Lake Titicaca in Sunglint The optical phenomenon revealed features on and below the Peruvian lake’s surface, such as wind patterns, natural surface films, and boat wakes. Published Jul 7, 2025 Image ...

In principle, it should be possible to add up each of the individual components of sea level rise—melting continental ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, retreating glaciers, the thermal expansion ...

Tropical forests are home to half the Earth's species, and their trees are an immense standing reservoir of carbon. Deforestation will have increasingly serious consequences for biodiversity, humans, ...

Combined with human demands, a multi-year drought in the Upper Colorado River Basin caused a dramatic drop in Lake Powell. Wet and dry seasons lead to annual fluctuations, but the massive reservoir is ...

The warm, shallow ocean waters of the tropics have talkative “forests” of their own. Brightly colored mounds of coral grow in the warm ocean waters, quickly when nutrients are plentiful and more ...

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 ...

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 ...

To understand how the Earth’s climate system balances the energy budget, we have to consider processes occurring at the three levels: the surface of the Earth, where most solar heating takes place; ...

Take a deep breath. Even if the air looks clear, it’s nearly certain that you’ll inhale tens of millions of solid particles and liquid droplets. These ubiquitous specks of matter are known as aerosols ...

Joanne Simpson became the first woman Ph.D. meteorologist. She also pioneered studies of cloud models, hurricanes, weather modification, and guided the development of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring ...

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High Earth Orbit When a satellite reaches exactly 42,164 kilometers from the center of the Earth (about 36,000 kilometers from Earth’s surface), it enters a sort of “sweet spot” in which its orbit ...