Hello SEAT blog followers. I am Summer Ruper, and I would like to share with you a little bit of the ice coring adventure that begins well before the field team heads to Antarctica. Before we start ...

Near infrared (NIR) light includes wavelengths between 700 and 1,100 nanometers. Water absorbs NIR, so these wavelengths are useful for discerning land-water boundaries that are not obvious in visible ...

When on land, an oceanography brain usually associates the term ocean motion with the movement of seawater in the form of ocean currents. However, when actually on the ocean, the biggest signal for ...

Please use the search box below to search The Earth Observatory.

One of the best surprises of my life was turning on my brand-new iPhone—before it had even been activated—glancing down at the screen, and seeing an image I had made. Apple chose the NASA Blue Marble ...

Just as the incoming and outgoing energy at the Earth’s surface must balance, the flow of energy into the atmosphere must be balanced by an equal flow of energy out of the atmosphere and back to space ...

A number of the instruments deployed during SPURS are “works in progress.” They work well, but need exercise in new or more challenging environments to perfect them. The whole of SPURS is an ...

In mid-September 2012, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) announced that Arctic sea ice had reached a new record minimum — 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles). The ...

These key science points were published on September 27, 2013, as “headline statements” by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as part of the organization’s fifth assessment report.

Vishnu, an Earth Observatory reader, posed a great question after viewing “The Six-Million Mile View of Earth and Moon“: “I’ve never seen a photo like that. Was the background beyond Earth ...

There are not many places in the open ocean that get their own special name as a “sea.” Most seas are what we call marginal seas – offshoots of the major ocean basins. The Sargasso Sea, as a vast ...

The thermosalinograph (TSG) on Knorr is a shipboard instrument for measuring temperature and salinity of the near surface water . It is situated in a lab and receives a flow of water taken in near the ...