Lake Chad’s Water, Wetlands, and Dunes Astronauts have photographed the diminishing lake in Central Africa for decades, most recently in January 2025, as its area remained just a fraction of its past ...

Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us where it is, what we are looking at, and why it is interesting.

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, ...

The Sun provides the energy that drives Earth’s climate, but not all of the energy that reaches the top of the atmosphere finds its way to the surface. That’s because aerosols—and clouds seeded by ...

Temperate deciduous forests are located in the mid-latitude areas which means that they are found between the polar regions and the tropics. The deciduous forest regions are exposed to warm and cold ...

The 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens — which began with a series of small earthquakes in mid-March and peaked with a cataclysmic flank collapse, avalanche, and explosion on May 18 — was not the largest ...

Spring is a time for blooming plants–and pollen. This image shows poppies blooming in California in Spring 2020. (Source: NASA Earth Observatory) Warm springtime temperatures signal shrub buds to ...

It takes a certain amount of devotion to reach Miyar Glacier. The glacier sits high in the Indian Himalayas, well away from towns and roads, but it rewards explorers with stunning scenery and mountain ...

Seven million years ago, some truly spectacular creatures roamed the woodlands of East Africa. There was a moose-like giraffe called Shiva’s beast. There were giant buffalo with horns wider than the ...

Old-growth forests are vital because they capture large amounts of carbon and provide homes to hundreds of species. In the Eastern United States, trees in these minimally disturbed ecosystems tend to ...

The Earth Observatory image of the day for June 5 shows flooding in Botswana’s Savuti River and Savuti Swamp. The abundant water turns out to be a very small part of a much bigger picture. The Savuti ...

In January 2016 in Kenya, the conditions were just right for an outbreak of Rift Valley fever. A strong El Niño on the other side of the world had brought higher temperatures and a wetter-than-normal ...