You have probably seen dramatic images and videos of several new fissure eruptions cracking open the land surface in Hawaii, emitting plumes of gas, and spitting up fountains of lava in the middle of ...

In 1967 Hansen went to work for NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York City, where he continued his research on planetary problems. Around 1970, some scientists suspected Earth was ...

Historic flooding along the Mississippi River gives me an excuse to show another of my favorite maps, from Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River. Each color ...

Twenty years ago this month, a hundred-year flood inundated cities along the Red River. The waters rose through April and May 1997, inundating 2,200 square miles (5,700 square kilometers) of North ...

Not all of NASA’s rovers are headed to Mars. A new Earth science rover nicknamed GROVER started roaming Greenland’s ice sheet this week. The autonomous, solar-operated robot carries a ...

Update on 4/25: This Landsat image shows Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument in the winter. Congratulations to Mike and Charles for being the first readers to identify the location. Every ...

Update on 4/25: This Landsat image shows Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument in the winter. Congratulations to Mike and Charles for being the first readers to identify the location. Every ...

Left unperturbed, the fast and slow carbon cycles maintain a relatively steady concentration of carbon in the atmosphere, land, plants, and ocean. But when anything changes the amount of carbon in one ...

Watson’s own study of the Australian zircons supports the idea of a cooler, wetter Hadean. Several years ago, Watson and the students working in his lab began work on a titanium “thermometer”—an ...

A year later, the newly created Earth Observation Satellite Co. (EOSAT), took over the operations of Landsat 4 and 5. But commercialization proved to be unworkable. The need recover its costs from ...

Aqua is the most comprehensive of NASA’s water cycle missions, but it isn’t alone. In fact, the Terra satellite also has MODIS and CERES instruments onboard, and several other spacecraft have made or ...

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 ...