Geography resources for teachers

An exclusive look inside Ground Truth, the secretive program to build the world's best accurate maps.

For the first time, a NASA airborne campaign will measure changes in the height of the Greenland Ice Sheet and surrounding Arctic sea ice produced by a single season of summer melt.

The age of discovery isn't over yet. A colossal canyon, the longest on Earth, has just been found under Greenland's ice sheet, scientists announced this week in the journal Science.

The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) is the primary sensor on the new generation GOES satellites, GOES-R. ABI will have 16 spectral bands, which will contribute to a greater number of products and better data quality. ABI will track and monitor cloud formation, atmospheric motion, convection monitoring, land surface temperature, ocean dynamics, flow of water, fire, smoke, volcanic ash plume, aerosols and air quality, as well as vegetation health. With 5 times faster coverage rate and 4 times better spatial resolution ABI is poised to become a true success story, benefitting the public by providing critical data.

The stone formation they destroyed was nearly 200 million years old, but the Boy Scout leaders who toppled it claim it posed an imminent threat.

The 3 men responsible, who filmed their activity in Utah's Goblin Valley State Park and uploaded the footage to Facebook, may face felony charges.

Owing to the alarmingly low temperatures in North America, Lake Michigan has turned into a sea of ice balls. Yes, it is that cold over there. Don't believe us? Watch the video!

Very cool news: Three new planets orbiting other stars — exoplanets — have had their picture directly taken! Seeing planets around other stars is hard. Planets are faint, and stars bright: From a distance, for example, the Sun is a billion times brighter than Jupiter. Most times, when we look at other stars, the planets are totally lost on the glare

Racing high over the Sahara at 5 miles per second, protected from the desert’s parched endlessness and soaking in its sere beauty, I saw Khartoum, the city where the White and Blue Nile rivers meet. I turned my head left and followed the river downstream to Cairo and the Mediterranean. Twisting weightlessly back to my right, I could pick out sunlight glinting off the waters of Lake Tana and Lake Victoria, the Nile’s headwaters.

Black rain made from volcanic ash and stone showered Italian comune of Giardini Naxos, Sicily, after Mount Etna, Europe’s most active volcano, erupted on Saturday. 

For five years, a scientific expedition tried reaching Pine Island Glacier ice shelf in a remote, wind-ridden corner of Antarctica. The obstacles to get to the ice shelf were extreme, but the science goal was simple: to measure how fast the sea was melting the 37-mile long ice tongue from underneath by drilling through the ice shelf.

One of the biggest questions in astronomy today is easy to ask, and incredibly hard to answer: How many Earth-like planets are there in the Universe? We want to know about potentially habitable planets, where life as we know it has a shot at getting a toe hold. This question is hard to answer because such planets are faint and very hard to detect. However, a team of astronomers today has announced they have come to a startling conclusion: Roughly one in five Sun-like stars should have Earth-like planets orbiting them.

A cluster of 18 small earthquakes in western Texas was likely triggered by the injection of carbon dioxide into oil wells, according to a study published Monday in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.