Videos

This Landsat 8 image from May 24th, 2017 shows an enthralling New Zealand landscape. Snow-capped mountain peaks, forests, farmland, and fog highlight the picturesque view of New Zealand's North Island. The scene was downloaded on March 9th, 2020 one of over 29,000 Landsat scenes downloaded worldwide that day. But this scene is special.

Landsat recently captured the most widespread meltwater pooling ever recorded on Antarctica's George VI Ice Shelf. Some melting is expected during the Antarctic summer, but the sheer extent of the stunning aqua ponds that have appeared amid the continent's warmest summer on record is remarkable.

In 2019, a December storm dropped around five inches of snow over northeast China near Baicheng. If conditions on the ground are right, a snow pattern can reveal a storm's path with remarkable detail. Landsat 8 captured this image of the area, revealing a distinct division between snow cover and clear ground.

The Shishaldin Volcano on the eastern edge of Alaska's Aleutian Island chain erupted with activity in January of 2020. The eruption on the island of Unimak sent an ash cloud nearly 5 miles into the sky on January 7th, sparking ash alerts for aviators, mariners, and residents of nearby communities.

It's winter in the northern hemisphere, but in Antarctica, summer has just begun. At Zucchelli Station the summer solstice occurred on December 22nd, 2019 at 5:19pm local time. The high temperature that day was a balmy 34 degrees Fahrenheit. These images from Landsat 8 show the distinct difference in sun angles cause by the change in seasons.

The LP DAAC recently released a new website designed to help you find the right data for your project. This video walks through 3 search options. https://lpdaac.usgs.gov

The smell of a fresh cut Christmas tree can evoke visions of majestic evergreen forests teeming with winter wildlife. In truth, more than half of U.S. Christmas trees come from farms in Oregon, North Carolina, or Michigan. Cut Christmas Trees area commodity, tracked by the U.S. Department of Agriculture just like corn or soybeans.

Fires burned across California in late 2019. Fall is the state's most dangerous season for wildfires, propelled by dry and windy conditions. In recent years however, the fall fire season has been starting earlier and ending later. A series of images from the MODIS sensor on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites show the Kincade Fire in northern California.

The USGS has developed Landsat-derived Level 2 and Level 3 science products that reduce the amount of time users spend on data processing and provide research quality, applications-ready information to monitor, assess and project how changes in the Earth's surface may affect communities and ecosystems.

Wildfires burned across Lebanon in mid-October, 2019. A pair of images taken just ten days apart by the European Space Agency's Sentinel-2A satellite show the burn scar from one of the larger wildfires. North of the fire scar is the country's capital, Beirut.

In September of 2019, a 315 ton iceberg known as D28 broke free from the Amery Ice Shelf in Antarctica. The berg has a surface area of more than 600 square miles, roughly comparable to the size of the Hawaiian island of Oahu. It's the largest iceberg to calve from the ice shelf since the 1960s. (Imagery captured by Landsat satellites.)

The Earth As Art project began in the early 2000s, and its original intent remains the same: to produce images that do not look like satellite images at first glance.

This is an Audio Described version of this video. Audio Descriptions are provided for visually impaired audiences. The Earth As Art project began in the early 2000s, and its original intent remains the same: to produce images that do not look like satellite images at first glance.

An earthquake and tsunami in March of 2011 leveled cities and left 18,000 people dead along the east coast of Japan. The government responded with a plan to build hundreds of sea walls in hopes of protecting coastal communities from future disasters. Rikuzentakata was among the cities fortified after the tragedy.

Abnormally high spring rainfall and subsequent flooding in the Midwest had a season-long impact on cropland production. In these Landsat images of South Dakota growing vegetation is shown as green and unplanted areas appear pink. The difference between 2018 and 2019 is striking.

In July, satellite imagery from Landsat 8 captured a major melting event in Greenland. 

Research Physical Scientist Dean Gesch shares an overview of USGS/EROS surveying efforts in the mangrove forests of Pohnpei.
 

Daytime and nightime imagery from Earth-observing satellites reveal dramatic changes in North Dakota during the Bakken oil boom.

 

Interested in citing data and tools from NASA’s Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC)? This video will discuss why you should cite the data and data access tools you use in your research and where you can find information on the LP DAAC website to help you with your citation.

Iceland had 269 named glaciers as of the year 2000 but ice has retreated in the face of warming temperatures. By 2014, OK Glacier in western Iceland had lost so much mass that it was no longer considered one at all. Icelanders now refer to it simply as OK, the name of the volcano upon which it rests.

 

Satellite imagery shows the rupture and shifting of land near Ridgecrest, CA from the July 2019 earthquakes.