Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The August 2025 puzzler is shown above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us where it is, what we are looking at, ...

Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The August 2025 puzzler is shown above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us where it is, what we are looking at, ...

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 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.

On January 12-13, 2020, Taal Volcano erupted for the first time in more than four decades. On January 22, ash plumes again emanated from Taal—but, this time, not from an eruption (seen above).

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).

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 ...

The night side of Earth twinkles with light. The first thing to stand out is the cities. “Nothing tells us more about the spread of humans across the Earth than city lights,” asserts Chris Elvidge, a ...

For a short time after a snowfall, glaciers are like blank white canvases. But it’s not long before the snowy surfaces are painted over with coats of dust, soot, ash, pollen, salt, sand, rocks, and ...

From their home on the International Space Station, astronauts have a view unlike anything most of us will ever see. Over 20 years, they have shot millions of photographs of Earth, and it is not just ...