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: This Landsat image shows dried lakes on the Tibetan plateau in 1994. Congratulations to David Alegre and James Varghese for being the first readers to identify the location. Read more about ...

I have sailed with my share of compelling characters since I began ocean research, and perhaps it is fitting that while we study ocean color aboard the R/V Falkor, I have had the pleasure of getting ...

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.

This is a remote place. The site is protected by a thousand kilometers of ice in nearly all directions, and the only ways to get here are by air or by boat for a couple of months of the year, when the ...

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 ...

The prevention of Rift Valley fever in Kenya in 2016 was a success story decades in the making. Twenty years ago, predicting a disease outbreak seemed like the realm of science fiction. But today, ...

Night Vision for Weather Forecasters The original motivation for making low-light Earth observations was practical: military meteorologists wanted to track clouds and storms, smoke plumes, and dust ...

A Global View of Glaciers Glaciers are rivers of frozen ice, fed by snowfall at high-latitude or high-altitude locations that stay cool year round. Some glaciers slide off the edges of giant ice ...

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 ...

Why does the difference matter? When we see a photo where the colors are brightened or altered, we think of it as artful (at best) or manipulated (at worst). We also have that bias when we look at ...

Lonar Crater, India India’s Lonar Crater began causing confusion soon after it was identified. Lonar Crater sits inside the Deccan Plateau—a massive plain of volcanic basalt rock leftover from ...