Earth Observation
Earth Observation
5,562 articles in this category.
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
Singapore's Marina Barrage transformed a polluted tidal estuary into a freshwater reservoir in the heart of the city in 2008, holding back the sea with a dam so the captured rainwater could supply drinking water and tame floods in the downtown core
Earth Observation
The Strait of Malacca and Singapore Strait grow so shallow in places that fully laden supertankers carrying a quarter of the world's seaborne oil are required to keep at least three and a half metres of water beneath their keels — about the height of a one-storey room — and squat and swell can quietly shave even that
Earth Observation
Seahorses, giant clams and even the occasional dugong have been recorded in the murky shallows of the Singapore Strait, where conservationists track marine life surviving beside shipping lanes that see roughly 1,000 vessels pass through every single day
Earth Observation
The Singapore Strait funnels roughly a third of the world's traded goods through a channel narrowing to about 3 kilometres wide near Phillip Channel, making it one of the busiest and most pirate-prone waterways on Earth, where ships sometimes queue for days awaiting passage
Earth Observation
The most remote spot in the world is so remote that the nearest humans are often not on Earth at all
Earth Observation
The Pacific Ocean is so vast that every continent, every island, and every desert on Earth could fit inside it with room to spare, which is why calling our planet blue is almost an understatement
Earth Observation
There is more freshwater locked inside the rocks of Earth's mantle than in every river, lake, and surface reservoir on the planet combined, hidden in a mineral called ringwoodite hundreds of miles beneath your feet
Mind & Meaning
Sequoia and redwood trees alive today were already mature when the Roman Empire was at its peak — the oldest living giant sequoias are over 3,000 years old, which means they were standing in California before the Parthenon was built in Athens, before Julius Caesar was born, and before the Roman Empire even existed
Earth Observation
Zealandia, the submerged continent geologists confirmed in 2017, is 94 percent underwater and stretches nearly two million square miles beneath the South Pacific, yet its modern name was quietly proposed by geophysicist Bruce Luyendyk in 1995
Earth Observation
New Zealand and New Caledonia are the only large fragments of Zealandia still poking above the ocean, meaning the country most travellers think of as a pair of islands is actually the exposed mountain peaks of a continent five times their size.
Earth Observation
A team led by Nick Mortimer at GNS Science in New Zealand spent two decades mapping the basalt and granite floor of the Tasman region before formally naming Zealandia in a 2017 paper, ending more than a century of arguments about whether a submerged landmass could still count as a continent.
Climate Science
NOAA has placed an 82 per cent probability that El Niño will emerge in the central Pacific between May and July 2026, the climate state that in 1997-98 caused more than 20,000 deaths worldwide and approximately US$36 billion in damage, that in 2015-16 produced what was then the warmest year on record and the most extensive Amazon drought yet measured, and that has accompanied every one of the ten warmest years in the global temperature record, all of which have occurred since 2015
Earth Observation