NASA provides a lot of spectacular images from space, but also does a lot of research on changes in the earth’s surface due to human activity as well as changes in climate on different time scales. Here are a couple of examples I ran across this week.
Vox.com posted a story based on NASA’s Earth Observatory showing the shrinking of Lake Mead in Arizona over the last 15 years. Extended drought in the area has led to a loss of more than half the water in the reservoir, which supplies not only Arizona but also California, Nevada and Mexico.
This week NASA published another story showing the greening of the Arctic due to warmer temperatures in recent years. They used 87,000 Landsat photos from 1984 and 2012 to look at changes in vegetation over time and noted that in many places what used to be tundra has been replaced by ecosystems from warmer areas. You can watch a video about it and read more about their technique and their findings at https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-studies-details-of-a-greening-arctic.
