As Greenland’s ice retreats, it’s fueling tiny ocean organisms. To test why, scientists turned to a computer model out of JPL and MIT that’s been called a laboratory in itself. Runoff from Greenland’s ice sheet is kicking nutrients up from the ocean depths and boosting phytoplankton growth, a new NASA-supported study has found. Reporting in […]
Category: PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem)
By Air and by Sea: Validating NASA’s PACE Ocean Color Instrument
In autumn 2024, California’s Monterey Bay experienced an outsized phytoplankton bloom that attracted fish, dolphins, whales, seabirds, and – for a few weeks in October – scientists. A team from NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, with partners at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), and the Naval Postgraduate School, spent two weeks […]
NASA’s PACE Mission Reveals a Year of Terrestrial Data on Plant Health
A lot can change in a year for Earth’s forests and vegetation, as springtime and rainy seasons can bring new growth, while cooling temperatures and dry weather can bring a dieback of those green colors. And now, a novel type of NASA visualization illustrates those changes in a full complement of colors as seen from […]
NASA Data Helps Map Tiny Plankton That Feed Giant Right Whales
In the waters off New England, one of Earth’s rarest mammals swims slowly, mouth agape. The North Atlantic right whale filters clouds of tiny reddish zooplankton — called Calanus finmarchicus — from the sea. These zooplankton, no bigger than grains of rice, are the whale’s lifeline. Only about 370 of these massive creatures remain. For […]
Celebrating Earth as Only NASA Can
From the iconic image of Earthrise taken by Apollo 8 crew, to the famous Pale Blue Dot image of Earth snapped by Voyager I spacecraft, to state-of-the-art observations of our planet by new satellites such as PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem), NASA has given us novel ways to see our home. This Earth Day, […]