In South Mississippi, counting pollen is usually done by sneezes. Or square feet. Not individually under a microscope. But, most of the pollen being counted by south Mississippians isn’t 60,000 years old. Trapped under the ocean floor. Andy Reese, a biogeographer at the University of Southern Mississippi, counts individual beads of pollen in his lab. The pollen he counts is… Read more →
Your browser does not support the video tag. For centuries, a massive store of carbon has been locked underground in the Arctic’s permanently frozen soil known as permafrost. As Earth’s climate continues to warm, that carbon has begun to leach into the atmosphere, the result of microbes waking up and digesting once-frozen organic materials. A new NASA-funded study focuses on… Read more →
Your browser does not support the video tag. Arctic sea ice extent ebbs and flows with the seasons. During the summer months, the ice melts and the edge recedes northward, usually reaching its annual minimum sometime in September. The ice extent is shaped by a variety of factors, including warmer temperatures, storms, and changes in the ocean, which makes it… Read more →
Back in 1998 NASA found this near-earth object. This asteroid is about the size of a small town – one to three kilometers wide. “The newly discovered [asteroid 1998 OR2 is] large enough to cause global effects if one impacted Earth,” Scientists at Jet Propulsion Laboratories said in a statement in 1998. “[It is] classified as “potentially hazardous objects” because… Read more →
Your browser does not support the video tag. Snow is one part of the cryosphere that many of us have actually encountered, but it also plays a crucial role in regulating Earth’s climate. Through decades of remote sensing, NASA has kept a close eye on the ebb and flow of snow cover. NASAExplorers also venture into the field at the… Read more →
