The turquoise lake in the crater of the Kawah Ijen volcano looks serene and inviting. It also happens to be the world's largest acidic lake. The water in the crater lake has a pH less than 0.3 on a scale of 0 to 14 (7 is neutral). For comparison, lemon juice has a pH of 2; battery acid has a pH of 1. That acidity affects the chemistry of nearby river ecosystems, including the river Banyupahit.
Of all the planets NASA has explored, none have matched the dynamic complexity of our own. Earth is constantly changing, and NASA scientists and engineers work daily to explore and understand the planet on scales from local to global. A new Blue Marble image was captured on March 30, 2014, by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite on the Suomi NPP satellite.
Located in the Brabazon Range of southeastern Alaska, Yakutat Glacier is one of the fastest-retreating glaciers in the world. It is the primary outlet for the 810-square-kilometer (310-square-mile) Yakutat Ice Field, which drains into Harlequin Lake and, ultimately, the Gulf of Alaska. Comparing satellite images from 1987 and 2013 show how quickly Yakutat is melting away.
As the seasons and years pass on Earth, different species tend to dominate the landscape at different times. Such is the case in summer in the surface waters of the Barents Sea, north of Scandinavia and Russia. NASA satellites recently captured a transitional moment between one form of microscopic, plant-like organisms (phytoplankton) and another as summer water conditions changed.
On July 26, 2014, NASA's Aqua satellite acquired this natural-color view of a massive bloom of phytoplankton off the coast of Oregon and Washington. Marine phytoplankton require just the right amount of sunlight, dissolved nutrients and moderate water temperatures to make their populations explode into blooms that cover hundreds of square kilometers of the sea.
Scour the Web, and you might conclude Earth scientists have learned”and mapped”pretty much everything they possibly could about the world's forests. But talk to forest experts, and they'll remind you there's still plenty more to learn.
Now in its third year, the drought in California grows worse each month. A pair of before-and-after change-detection images, captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA's Aqua satellite, reveals a striking view of the situation.
With a population of more than 20 million”roughly 10 percent of Brazil's population”São Paulo ranked as the 10th largest urban area in the world in 2014. The city is no newcomer to the list. For two decades starting in the 1980s, São Paulo was the fourth largest city in the world. As the city has grown, its suburbs have spread, and its urban core has become more dense.
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 United States.
Flowing south along Australia's western shore, the Leeuwin Current is an oddity. Unlike most currents that flow along the western shores of continents, it flows toward the pole (away from the equator), carrying warm tropical water into what would otherwise be a cold ocean.
