If you want to see global warming’s signature, look to the Arctic. Up north, the air is warming and the ice is melting. As all of that reflective ice goes away, the Arctic Ocean is soaking up more sunlight, further enhancing warming. Melting Arctic ice is also contributing significantly to sea level rise. For two […]
Not even clouds could obscure the International Space Station as it passed directly over Huntsville, Ala. on the evening of June 13 at 9:15 p.m. CDT. Shining as bright as the planet Venus, the space station took nearly four minutes to traverse the sky before disappearing in the murk to the Northeast. Its passage was …
Science writers and producers from across NASA recently sponsored an Earth Day video contest for the public. The theme was “The Home Frontier,” and the idea was to create videos that expressed what NASA Earth science means to you. Many people don’t realize that one of our agency’s most important missions is to study the […]
On Tornadoes and Climate The Joplin twister, which a GOES satellite observed on May 23, has promoted many people to wonder if climate change has fueled the recent spree of storms. The answer: possibly La Nina (Reuters), no (Agence France-Presse), and not likely (Climate Central). Should We Use Levees to Build in Floodplains? The swollen Mississippi raises […]
Welcome to Earth Matters, the news and notes blog of Earth Observatory. And welcome to an ongoing conversation about our amazing planet. Earth Matters will be composed by the science writers, data visualizers, and web developers of Earth Observatory and of NASA’s Earth Science News Team. We are former journalists and scientists, communications majors and […]
In response to Map of the Ancient Mississippi a few of you left comments to the effect of “no one should live in floodplains.” It’s an appealing notion, but I think it’s unrealistic. Anne Jefferson of Highly Allochthonous published an epic post yesterday outlining the benefits and risks of building in a flood plain, and […]
Sticking to the flood theme, here’s a recent map from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers showing the predicted travel time for water in the Morganza Floodway. It’s a reasonably good map, with one big flaw: the colors are more appropriate for categorical data (such as a geological map of different rock types) rather than […]
May 19, 2011 We are now well on our way back home again, with our GPS stations dutifully recording ice motion in our absence. Several of the stations will be visited again this summer, and all will have a visit this fall to freshen them up for winter. It was something of a whirlwind tour, […]
May 18, 2011 When working out on the ice sheet, it is useful to have a base of operations, so as to not have to move your whole camp every day you want to go to a new place. For our project, Swiss Camp served as our base of operations. Swiss Camp is one of just […]
May 17, 2011 When we arrived at each study site, we began the process of constructing a GPS station. The first step was probing the snow for crevasses before we start unloading heavy equipment from the sled. By mid-summer, this region will all be bare ice but now it is still covered by about a meter of […]
