Washington, June 6, 2026, 14:06 EDT
NASA’s latest Black Marble images paint a more complex picture of Earth’s nightscape. Some areas are lighting up due to electrification and development, but elsewhere, lights have faded—whether from war, changes in energy policy, economic strain, or shifts to more efficient lighting. The planet’s nighttime glow, in other words, is flickering rather than simply brightening.
Why does it matter? Nighttime lights now serve as a quick readout for shifts in human activity—urban expansion, energy demand, even oilfields and disaster zones send signals that satellites can pick up. The paper tracking these images shows a net 16% uptick in global nighttime artificial lighting from 2014 through 2022. That figure comes after a 34% jump off the 2014 base was partially countered by an 18% drop elsewhere.
NASA’s Black Marble taps VIIRS sensors—those are the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite instruments—fitted on the Suomi NPP, NOAA-20, and NOAA-21 satellites. Data rolls out daily, monthly, or annually, and near-real-time versions typically land within three hours. It’s used to monitor everything from nighttime light pollution to illegal fishing, gas flares, and crisis zones.
The new maps span nearly all settled regions from 60° south up to 70° north. According to NASA Earth Observatory, cities along the U.S. West Coast have grown brighter with population increases, but the East Coast has faded—researchers connect this to the rise of energy-efficient LEDs and larger economic changes. Brightness surged in China and northern India. France, the UK, and the Netherlands, on the other hand, saw notable drops.
“For decades, we’ve held a simplified view” that Earth’s nighttime lights just kept getting brighter, said Zhe Zhu, a University of Connecticut professor and lead author of the study, in comments to Reuters. “We discovered that the Earth’s nightscape is actually highly volatile.” Reuters noted the United States topped the list for total luminosity in 2022, with China, India, Canada, and Brazil trailing behind. Reuters
The images highlight wasted energy, too. NASA pointed to satellite data revealing regular gas flaring—oil producers burning off surplus gas—across Texas’s Permian Basin and North Dakota’s Bakken Formation. “Flared gas is money burned,” said Deborah Gordon, a methane specialist at the Rocky Mountain Institute, who had no role in the study. NASA Science
Tian Li and Zhu’s team at UConn ran a fresh algorithm across 1.16 million nighttime satellite shots, each snapped around 1:30 a.m. local time, spanning nine years. According to UConn, their research picked up clear drops in lights over Ukraine after Russia invaded in 2022, lingering conflict patterns in Syria and Yemen, and traces of COVID-19 lockdowns and Europe’s energy policies.
Dimming doesn’t always translate directly to darker skies. Satellite images snapped near 1:30 a.m. can miss out on brighter hours earlier in the night, and LED lighting often slips past the sensors’ most sensitive wavelengths. France’s reported 33% decline, researchers told Le Monde, signals both legitimate progress from policy moves—and the boundaries of current measurement tools.
The Scientific Visualization Studio at NASA dropped new animations tracking night-light changes worldwide since 2014—gold splotches for areas that brightened, purple for places that faded, white for spots with mixed results. What emerges isn’t some tidy story of global expansion. Instead, it’s a restless map of building booms, power grid extensions, conservation pushes, factory rhythms, and moments of upheaval.
