This month we published a satellite image and map of the southern United States featuring the Black Belt Prairie—a crescent-shaped swath of land running through Mississippi and Alabama named for its ...

Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The June 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 on February 5, 2025: This Landsat image shows the Zavaritskogo (also called Zavaritskii) caldera in the Kuril Archipelago, between northern Japan and Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.

Satellite images of Earth at night have been a curiosity for the public and a tool of fundamental research for at least 25 years. They have provided a broad, beautiful picture, showing how humans have ...

Some 25 of us were up before 6 a.m. to head out on the bus from the hotel to Burlington International Airport to catch the C-130 aircraft, a military transport plane repurposed for NASA fieldwork, to ...

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 ...

The night side of Earth twinkles with light. The first thing to stand out is the cities. “Nothing tells us more about the spread of humans across the Earth than city lights,” asserts Chris Elvidge, a ...

For a short time after a snowfall, glaciers are like blank white canvases. But it’s not long before the snowy surfaces are painted over with coats of dust, soot, ash, pollen, salt, sand, rocks, and ...

For 20 years, astronauts have been shooting photos of Earth from the space station. Like everything the astronauts do, they are trained for this job. And like everything they do, there is purpose and ...

From their home on the International Space Station, astronauts have a view unlike anything most of us will ever see. Over 20 years, they have shot millions of photographs of Earth, and it is not just ...

From their perch on the space station, astronauts have spent 20 years sharing a story about Earth as they see it from above. Like the directors of a film, those astronaut storytellers have a crew ...