Earth Observation
Earth Observation
1,091 articles in this category.
Earth Observation
The Earth's inner core grows by roughly a millimetre a year as molten iron freezes onto it, and that slow crystallisation releases the energy that stirs the outer core and keeps the planet's magnetic field alive
Earth Observation
Gold, platinum and most of Earth's heavy metals sank into the core as the young planet melted, and the gold we mine today likely arrived later in a rain of asteroids that struck after the core had already formed
Earth Observation
Everything we know about the Earth's core comes from earthquakes: seismic waves slow, bend, and vanish as they cross the boundaries below us, and in 1936 a Danish scientist named Inge Lehmann read those shadows to reveal a hidden inner core nested at the planet's center
Earth Observation
In 2023, seismologists at the Australian National University, reading the echoes of earthquakes ringing back and forth through the whole planet, confirmed Earth hides an innermost core inside its inner core, a distinct iron ball roughly 1,300 kilometres across whose crystals line up along a different axis than the shell around it
Earth Observation
Antarctica is classified as a desert because it receives less precipitation than the Sahara, yet it holds about 70 per cent of the planet's fresh water, locked in an ice sheet averaging over two kilometres thick across the continent
Earth Observation
On July 1, 2026, the company once known as Maxar began selling 3D maps of Earth it can refresh within a day or sharpen to 15 centimeters, built less for people to study than for the autonomous drones and weapons that navigate by matching their cameras against the terrain
Earth Observation
On 29 April 2020, a single bolt of lightning stretched 768 kilometres across Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi in one continuous flash, far enough to reach from New York City to Columbus, Ohio before the thunder from its first end had finished rolling
Earth Observation
Satellites can now tell a palm oil plantation from native rainforest by the precise angle its fronds bend the sunlight, reading the near-perfect planted lattice against the chaos of wild canopy — and the European Union's 2023 deforestation regulation now leans on their ability to do exactly that
Earth Observation
In the early 1960s, mother bald eagles across the United States were crushing their own eggs by sitting on them, in a continent-wide reproductive collapse caused by a single agricultural pesticide, and by 1963 only 417 nesting pairs of America's national symbol remained alive in the lower 48 states
Science
In 1987, Costa Rica's forest cover had collapsed to roughly 21% of the country, and the mechanism that quietly reversed it over the next three decades was not a treaty but a small line item in the national tax on gasoline, paying private landowners to let the trees grow back
Earth Observation
Point Nemo sits so far from any coastline that the closest humans to it are often the astronauts aboard the International Space Station passing overhead, not anyone standing on land.
Earth Observation
In 1971, a team of Soviet geologists in Turkmenistan's Karakum Desert set a collapsed gas crater alight and assumed the flames would burn out within weeks, but more than five decades later the pit travelers now call the Door to Hell is still throwing orange light across the dunes every night
Earth Observation
Beneath the Antarctic ice, a lake the size of Lake Ontario has been sealed off from sunlight for roughly 15 million years, and when Russian drillers finally reached Lake Vostok in 2012 they recovered water teeming with traces of life that had evolved in total darkness.
Constellations
In 1946, a captured German V-2 rocket launched from White Sands carried Clyde Holliday’s 35-millimetre DeVry motion-picture camera above the Kármán line and returned the first photographs of Earth from space on film recovered after the rocket crashed in the New Mexico desert
Earth Observation