Anyone who has ever planned to spend hours outside on a hot, sunny day has probably heard the advice to wear light colors. Pale colors reflect much of the Sun’s light, keeping their wearers cool. The ...

In the planet’s highest northern latitudes, even the water in the soil is locked away as ice, making it mostly inaccessible to plants. But just a short distance to the south, in the boreal areas of ...

Desertification. The word invokes images of sand dunes blowing over abandoned farms as some irresistible, dark force steadily transforms fertile fields into inhospitable wasteland. The United Nations’ ...

EO Kids, a publication from the Earth Observatory, highlights science stories for a younger audience. In our new edition, we explore the swirling seas of phytoplankton blooms and create your own NASA ...

Air temperatures on Earth have been rising since the Industrial Revolution. While natural variability plays some part, the preponderance of evidence indicates that human activities—particularly ...

Welcome, teachers, to Mission: Biomes! This site was designed for teachers to use in classrooms as a supplementary, interdisciplinary unit. Mission: Biomes is especially appropriate for grades 3 ...

“The pioneering work that Marshall did with the TRMM satellite data to analyze the signature of urban areas started a lot of people thinking of different ways that they can relate space-borne rainfall ...

Mauna Loa is indeed an active volcano; it last erupted in 1950, 1975, and 1984. Between eruptions, it emits variable amounts of carbon dioxide (CO 2) and sulfur dioxide (SO 2) from fissures at the ...

All matter in the universe that has a temperature above absolute zero (the temperature at which all atomic or molecular motion stops) radiates energy across a range of wavelengths in the ...

Left unperturbed, the fast and slow carbon cycles maintain a relatively steady concentration of carbon in the atmosphere, land, plants, and ocean. But when anything changes the amount of carbon in one ...

How far can dust travel? Where does it come from? Explore the answers to these questions and make a model of how dust affects sky visibility in Dust a True World Traveler.

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 ...