Friday, November 22nd, 2024
An international team of scientists using observations from NASA-German satellites found evidence that Earth’s total amount of freshwater dropped abruptly starting in May 2014 and has remained low ever since. Reporting in Surveys in Geophysics, the researchers suggested the shift could indicate Earth’s continents have entered a persistently drier phase. From 2015 through 2023, satellite measurements
Friday, November 8th, 2024
As Europe grapples with unprecedented floods and Asia faces the fury of typhoons, a different crisis is unfolding in South America: record droughts. Geographers Elzė Buslavičiūtė and Dr. Laurynas Jukna from Vilnius University’s Department of Geography and Landscape Management shed light on alarming conditions in the Amazon basin, where river levels have plummeted to historic
Monday, October 28th, 2024
The global ocean absorbs roughly a quarter of carbon emissions from human activities, which is extremely important in helping to slow climate change. On the flip side, however, this benefit does come at a cost: as oceans take in more carbon, their waters become more acidic, endangering the health of marine ecosystems. Enhancing our understanding
Friday, October 11th, 2024
As goods of all shapes and sizes journey from factory to doorstep, chances are they’ve stopped at a warehouse along the way—likely several of them. The sprawling structures are waypoints in the logistics networks that make e-commerce possible. Yet the convenience comes with tradeoffs, as illustrated in a recent NASA-funded study. Published in the journal GeoHealth,
Monday, September 30th, 2024
Arctic sea ice retreated to near-historic lows in the Northern Hemisphere this summer, likely melting to its minimum extent for the year on Sept. 11, 2024, according to researchers at NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The decline continues the decades-long trend of shrinking and thinning ice cover in the Arctic
Tuesday, September 17th, 2024
August 2024 set a new monthly temperature record, capping Earth’s hottest summer since global records began in 1880, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. The announcement comes as a new analysis upholds confidence in the agency’s nearly 145-year-old temperature record. June, July and August 2024 combined were
Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024
Stoked by Canada’s warmest and driest conditions in decades, extreme forest fires in 2023 released about 640 million metric tons of carbon, NASA scientists have found. That’s comparable in magnitude to the annual fossil fuel emissions of a large industrialized nation. NASA funded the study as part of its ongoing mission to understand our changing
Tuesday, August 20th, 2024
Geolabe—a prize winner in the 2023 Entrepreneurs Challenge—developed a way to use artificial intelligence to identify global methane emissions. Methane is a greenhouse gas that significantly contributes to global warming, and this promising new technology could provide data to help decision makers develop strategies to mitigate climate change. The Geolabe team developed a deep learning
Tuesday, August 6th, 2024
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)-supported scientists announced that this year’s Gulf of Mexico “dead zone”—an area of low to no oxygen that can kill fish and marine life—is approximately 6,705 square miles, the 12th largest zone on record in 38 years of measurement. This figure equates to more than 4 million acres of habitat potentially
Tuesday, July 23rd, 2024
Days on Earth are growing slightly longer, and that change is accelerating. The reason is connected to the same mechanisms that also have caused the planet’s axis to meander by about 30 feet (10 meters) in the past 120 years. The findings come from two recent NASA-funded studies focused on how the climate-related redistribution of
