Like some fantastic land conjured by a storyteller, Ethiopia's Danakil Depression (or Afar Depression) exhibits some uncommon wonders: lava that burns blue, bright yellow hot springs and lakes of bubbling mud. These otherworldly oddities are all manifestations of a tectonic process called continental rifting.
A piece of Africa”actually lots of pieces”began to arrive in the Americas in June 2014. On June 23, a lengthy river of dust from western Africa began to push across the Atlantic Ocean on easterly winds. A week later, the influx of dust was affecting air quality as far away as the southeastern Unites States.
The combined strength of two storms that merged on Aug. 5, 2012, gave birth to an unusually large, powerful and long-lasting cyclone that churned over the Arctic in early August 2012.
People love images of the full disk of Earth as it would appear from space. During the last week of January 2012, NASA science colleague Norman Kuring took some fresh data from the agency's newest Earth observation satellite, projected them onto a disk and voila”3 million people viewed the image in a week! The wave of interest is still spreading across the Internet and social media, but have you ever wondered how these images are made?
This one-foot resolution, digital aerial image of Joplin, Mo., was collected May 24, 2011, at approximately 9:30 a.m. The image shows the remains of Joplin High School, located at 21st and Indiana, just two days after a Level 5 tornado touched down on May 22, 2011 and...
A low-pressure system with strong winds drove this thick cloud of dust from North Africa's Saharan Desert all the way to Portugal.
Tassili n’Ajjer National Park covers 72,000 square kilometers (27,800 square miles) in southeastern Algeria. Part of the Sahara Desert, the park has a bone-dry climate with scant rainfall, yet does not blend in with Saharan dunes. Instead, the rocky plateau rises...
Snow cover highlights the calderas and volcanic cones that form the northern
and southern ends of Onekotan Island, part of the Russian Federation in the
western Pacific Ocean.
