Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The July 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 9 image shows an island group and its surrounding waters off mainland Mozambique. Congratulations to Mark for being the first reader to identify the location and to Yaakov ...

Update on May 27, 2025: This springtime Landsat image shows snow-covered tundra streaked with wind-blown sediment near Utqiaġvik, Alaska, the northernmost city in the United States. Congratulations to ...

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 ...

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 ...

At a weekend science camp in the remote village of Bautista, Philippines, the faces of students at Coloscaoyan National High School quickly changed from skepticism to excitement when they realized ...

After our adventures in Quebec and Greenland, it was now time for our last stop in this intense season of fieldwork. This time we were heading to the Canadian Northwest Territories (NWT).

Jason Budinoff, an aerospace engineer, cocked his head, listening for the sound of metal on metal. “Can you hear it?” someone asked. The room quieted, and a soft, tinny buzz whined from the instrument ...

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 ...

Out of the Blue and Into the Black New Views of the Earth at Night The night is nowhere near as dark as most of us think. In fact, the Earth is never really dark. And we don’t have to be in the dark ...