Videos

Before landing on the surface of the moon in 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin needed a training ground that matched their destination's cratered surface.

A Landsat satellite image captured the flooding in Dell Rapids, SD in the Spring of 2019. It's remarkably similar to an aerial photograph of flooding 50 years earlier. 

 

The Marsh Arabs of southeastern Iraq have spent millennia traversing the waterways at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The recent history of those wetlands, however, has been one of forced loss and uneven recovery. 

Scientists with the USGS Yellowstone Volcano Observatory use satellite and aerial imagery to map hot springs, geothermal vents, and geysers at Yellowstone National Park. They recently found an entirely new thermal area miles from the nearest trailhead. Landsat 8's thermal infrared sensors captured the change in a nighttime image from April of 2017.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor is located aboard NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. These data are crucial for studying changes that have occurred on the surface of the Earth, including during times of drought.

This tutorial explains how to use the compare browse functionality in EarthExplorer to preview Landsat scenes prior to downloading. 
 

This short video provides a quick demonstration of the Point Sample using the Application for Extracting and Exploring Analysis Ready Samples (AρρEEARS). 

EarthExplorer helps users get to exactly the scenes they want. The Additional Criteria tab helps users pick scenes that meet specific requirements. 

This video will show you how to utilize the Additional Criteria tab in EarthExplorer.

Unlike the South Pole, the geographic North Pole does not lie on a land mass. The Earth’s northern axis of rotation is in the Arctic Ocean, covered by shifting sea ice.



Landsat does not image the North Pole, which makes it an imperfect investigative tool for the detection of Santa’s workshop. 

In the 5th edition of Earth as Art, we continue to display the Earth as our eyes cannot see it—in creative combinations of visible and infrared light. 

These unreal views of farmland, coastlines, and snowscapes remind us of the powerfully artistic qualities of Earth’s land features.

Lake Meredith National Recreation Area takes its name from the water body it surrounds in the Texas Panhandle. The Amarillo-area lake sees more than a million visitors a year.

Route 66 was established in November 1926. Named “The Mother Road” by John Steinbeck, the route is a cultural icon of America, symbolizing mobility and freedom.



We mark the route with this satellite mosaic and a combination of historical aerial photos and current aerial imagery from the USGS EROS Center archive.

Antarctica’s interior is circled by glacial ice flows that move outward from the frozen continent’s surface.



Imagery collected over Antarctica by satellites like Landsat is typically marked by highly reflective snow and ice, but isolated pockets of wind-swept glacial ice glow with a distinct blue.

This short video provides a quick demonstration of the Area Sample using the Application for Extracting and Exploring Analysis Ready Samples (AρρEEARS). 

Satellites have captured views of the numerous major fires burning in California.



An image acquired on November 9, 2018, from NASA’s MODIS sensor on the Terra satellite shows smoke pouring out of two major fires, the Camp Fire and the Woolsey Fire, which both ignited the day before.

Another large iceberg recently broke off Pine Island Glacier, Antarctica. According to the U.S. National Ice Center, this iceberg, named B-46, has an area of 87 square miles. That’s slightly larger than the iceberg that previously separated from the glacier in September 2017.

In September 2011, the largest dam removal project in U.S. history began. 



Two dams built on the Elwha River in the early 1900s created two reservoirs in northwestern Washington. They also greatly reduced the amount of sediment flowing to the river’s delta and blocked salmon migration upstream into Olympic National Park.

USGS/EROS Physical Scientist Dean Gesch and USGS/EROS CoNED Applications Project Chief Jeff Danielson discuss the Coastal National Elevation Database (CoNED), its acquisition and its uses.
 

USGS/EROS Physical Scientist Dean Gesch and USGS/EROS CoNED Applications Project Chief Jeff Danielson discuss different remote sensing methods they used to create topobathemetric elevation models of the Majuro Atoll.
 

Hurricane Michael made landfall in the Florida Panhandle on October 10, 2018.



Landsat 7 images captured before and after highlight the destructive path of the Category 4 storm.

October 16, 2018, marks the two-year anniversary of the Cottonwood Fire in western South Dakota. The fire consumed a large swath of grassland near the community of Wall and just north of Badlands National Park.