“Arctic sea ice reached its annual maximum extent on March 17, according to analysis by NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The 2018 extent reached 5.59 million square miles, only about 23,000 square miles larger than the lowest maximum on record, in 2017.
This continues a trend of shrinking sea ice, with the four lowest Arctic sea ice maximum extents on record in the last four years. Dr. Claire Parkinson explains how and why NASA studies Arctic sea ice.”
Music Credit: Children’s Carousel by Maxi Schulze [GEMA], Moritz Limmer [GEMA]
“Forests are living, ever changing ecosystems, affected by aging, natural disasters and human interventions. Annual maps of the lower-48 United States produced from satellite data illustrate how these dynamic systems changed from 1986-2010. Logging and hurricanes play a significant role in the Southeast, and fires and insect invasion damage forest canopy in the West. Trees are one of the world’s best absorbers of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. Understanding how trees and forests change through time is one of the first steps to understanding how active they are in pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, which is of profound interest to scientists monitoring climate change.
Developed for the North American Forest Dynamics study, scientists combined 25 years of satellite data from the joint U.S. Geological Survey/NASA Landsat satellite program with information from the U.S. Forest Service to highlight where forest canopy was disturbed.”
Music credit: Dusk On The Plains by B. Boston
Video Credit: NASA Goddard
Additional credits:
Matthew R. Radcliff (USRA): Lead Producer
Greg Shirah (NASA/GSFC): Lead Animator
Jeffrey Masek (NASA/GSFC): Scientist
Jeffrey Masek (NASA/GSFC): Writer
Matthew R. Radcliff (USRA): Writer
Chengquan Huang (University of Maryland): Scientist
“In 2018, NASA will intensify its focus on one of the most critical but remote parts of our changing planet with the launch of two new satellite missions and an array of airborne campaigns. GRACE-FO and ICESat-2 will use radically different techniques to observe how the massive ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are changing over time and how much they are contributing to sea level rise.
The space agency is launching these missions at a time when decades of observations from the ground, air, and space have revealed signs of change in Earth’s ice sheets, sea ice, glaciers, snow cover, and permafrost. Collectively, scientists call these frozen regions of our planet the “cryosphere.”
Music: Pending News by Christian Telford
Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/LK Ward
“Global temperatures in 2017 were second only to 2016, which still holds the record for the hottest year; however, 2017 was the warmest year on record that did not start with an El Nino weather pattern, as the previous two years did. In a separate, independent analysis, NOAA scientists found that 2017 was the third-warmest year in their record. The minor difference is due to different methods to analyze global temperatures used by the two agencies, although over the long-term the records remain in strong agreement.”
Music: Sojourner Rover by Craig Warnock [PRS], Lee Ahmad Baker [PRS], Sean Hennessey [PRS]
“The “Cueva de los Verdes” lava tube in Lanzarote, Spain, is one of the world’s largest volcanic cave complexes with a total length of about 8 km. Geology experts from ESA’s Pangaea-X campaign mapped most of the lava tube system as part of a project supported by local authorities Cabildo of Lanzarote and the University of Padova, Italy. The data was acquired in November 2017 by Leica Geosystems. The map comes alive in great detail in 3D, helping institutions to protect the subterranean environment. The map also provides scientific data to study the origins of the tube and its peculiar formations.”
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