• Fires burn in eastern Russia

    140 hotbeds of wildfires with the total area 13 906.28 hectares have been registered in the Russian Federation within twenty four hours. 139 hotbeds with th area 4 832.88 ha have been extinguished. 167 hotbeds, including those emerged earlier and 16 large ones continue

  • Sandstorm over Iraq

    A thick dust plume blew over Iraq on June 2, 2011, stopping just short of Iran and Kuwait. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image the same day.The dust forms a giant beige arc that

  • Texas suffers from “exceptional” drought

    A report released Thursday from a consortium of national climate experts said Texas saw the highest levels of drought over the last week — rated as "exceptional" — jump from 43.97 percent of the state to 50.65 percent of the state. Devastating drou

  • Old River and the Mississippi River control

    The Mississippi River is highly “engineered,” as major rivers go. The battle between human civilization and the river is perhaps best exemplified by the Old River Control structures in central Louisiana. Completed in the 1960s, the system of levees, locks,

  • Co-orbital asteroid 2009BD flyby

    Small asteroid 2009 BD is flying through the Earth-moon system today about 215,000 miles from Earth. The 10m wide space rock poses no threat to our planet, but it is of acute scientific interest.”It’s notable because it remains close to Earth for months at a time and

  • Flooding in Quebec and Northeastern U.S.

    Flooding affected areas on either side of the United States-Canada border in late May 2011. Along the Vermont-New York border, Lake Champlain was at major flood stage, according to the Advanced Hydrological Prediction Service (AHPS) of the U.S. National Weather

  • New Greenland ice loss study emerges

     In the last decade, two of the three largest glaciers in Greenland have lost enough ice that, if melted, could have filled Lake Erie.This startling picture of Greenland’s ice loss comes from a new study that refines measurements of such ice loss and is