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 ...

Most people will never see Pine Island Glacier in person. Located near the base of the Antarctic Peninsula—the “thumb” of the continent—the glacier lies more than 2,600 kilometers (1,600 miles) from ...

At least as far back as King David’s psalms and Isaiah’s prophecies, snow has been characterized as a symbol of purity. “Lawn [linen] as white as driven snow” was how Shakespeare once described it.

If you want to set up a scientific station at the bottom of the world, who would you send? Eighteen “crazy men and a dog,” of course. The men were a collection of engineers, scientists, and support ...

Since 1999, Earth Observatory has published 16,000+ images. To celebrate our 20th anniversary and the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, we want you to pick our all-time best image. Each week from March ...

It took someone with an entirely different perspective to tame the lion; it took a Dutch engineer who was more interested in practical applications than the exacting precision of science. Engineer and ...

In the black dome of night, the stars seem fixed in their patterns. They rotate through the sky over the seasons so unchangingly that most cultures have used the presence of one or another ...

Each summer, monsoon rains sweep across southwestern Asia, soaking India and Bangladesh. In nearby Pakistan, the rains are usually less intense, more intermittent, and centered in the northeast. The ...

Carbon is the backbone of life on Earth. We are made of carbon, we eat carbon, and our civilizations—our economies, our homes, our means of transport—are built on carbon. We need carbon, but that need ...

All of this extra carbon needs to go somewhere. So far, land plants and the ocean have taken up about 55 percent of the extra carbon people have put into the atmosphere while about 45 percent has ...

The most valuable fossils found in sediment cores are from tiny animals with a calcium carbonate shell, called foraminifera. One species of foraminifera lives in the icy waters of the Arctic above ...

Before widespread human settlement began to encroach on the borders of South America’s Amazon forests, there was no such thing as an Amazon fire season. Now, fire may pose the biggest threat to the ...