Scambos and his colleagues had created the Mosaic of Antarctica map by layering hundreds of digital images of Antarctica taken by Aqua and Terra MODIS between late 2003 and early 2004. To help Fricker ...

Even after the monsoon rains subsided, waters retreated much more slowly than they had advanced. Months after the rains stopped, crops, homes, businesses, and entire towns were still submerged. In ...

Apart from letting humanity see Earth differently than ever before, the view from space has also expanded our understanding of how the planet works, and just in time to grasp the impact humanity is ...

Because scientists know which wavelengths of energy each greenhouse gas absorbs, and the concentration of the gases in the atmosphere, they can calculate how much each gas contributes to warming the ...

But the evidence for a heliocentric solar system gradually mounted. When Galileo pointed his telescope into the night sky in 1610, he saw for the first time in human history that moons orbited Jupiter ...

In October 2015, Antarctic sea ice peaked for the year at 18.8 million square kilometers (7.3 million square miles). That’s smaller than the previous three years, but falls just about in the middle of ...

Arctic sea ice occupies an ocean basin mostly enclosed by land. Because there is no landmass at the North Pole, sea ice extends all the way to the pole, making the ice subject to the most extreme ...

Forged in the heart of aging stars, carbon is the fourth most abundant element in the Universe. Most of Earth’s carbon—about 65,500 billion metric tons—is stored in rocks. The rest is in the ocean, ...

Tiny Vectors, Big Problems Between 2004 and 2006, islands in the western Indian Ocean experienced an unprecedented outbreak of chikungunya. At least 200,000 people on the island of La Reunion were ...

Dirty snow usually melts faster than fresh snow because it absorbs more energy from the Sun, and that’s not just a problem in sooty, gritty cities. Except for some mountains and high plateaus, snow ...

The animation at the top of this page shows a wide view of Pine Island Glacier (PIG) and the long-term retreat of its ice front. Images were acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging ...

Then came the International Geophysical Year (IGY). Scientists from around the world designated the period from July 1957 through December 1958 to be a time for international collaborative efforts to ...