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 ...

When Sarah Mims discovered that smoke drifting across the Gulf of Mexico from fires in Central America was bringing fungal spores to the air around her home Seguin, Texas, she was definitely surprised ...

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 ...

Near infrared (NIR) light includes wavelengths between 700 and 1,100 nanometers. Water absorbs NIR, so these wavelengths are useful for discerning land-water boundaries that are not obvious in visible ...

Kathryn Hansen is the managing editor for NASA Earth Observatory. She has been writing stories, producing videos, and editing content for the group since 2014. Prior to joining Earth Observatory, ...

The water, or hydrologic, cycle describes the pilgrimage of water as water molecules make their way from the Earth’s surface to the atmosphere and back again, in some cases to below the surface. This ...

There are several ways space-based technologies can help us understand where species live and why they live there. One way is to directly observe species using satellite sensors with spatial ...

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 ...

All matter in the universe that has a temperature above absolute zero (the temperature at which all atomic or molecular motion stops) radiates energy across a range of wavelengths in the ...

Desertification. The word invokes images of sand dunes blowing over abandoned farms as some irresistible, dark force steadily transforms fertile fields into inhospitable wasteland. The United Nations’ ...

Variations in TSI are due to a balance between decreases caused by sunspots and increases caused by bright areas called faculae which surround sunspots. Sunspots are dark blotches on the Sun in which ...

The total change in TSI over the 11-year cycle is believed to be 0.1 percent of the Sun’s total energy on a yearly average. Individual sunspot events are very accurately reproduced in independent TSI ...