Science
Related: About this forumThe Earth’s Seasonal “Heartbeat” as Seen from Space
We all know that as the seasons change on Earth, temperatures rise and fall, plants grow or die, ice forms or melts away. Perhaps nobody is more aware of this than NASAs Visible Earth team who provide a vast catalog of images of our home planet as seen from space. Last month designer, cartographer, and dataviz expert John Nelson download a sequence of twelve cloud-free satellite imagery mosaics of Earth, one from each month, and then created a number of vivid animated gifs showing the seasonal changes in vegetation and land ice around the world.
Despite having encountered numerous seasonal timelapse videos shot here on Earth, this is the first time Ive ever seen anything like this visualized on such a large scale from space. It really looks like a heartbeat or the action of breathing. Read more over on Nelsons blog, or see a much larger version of the gif here.
link
http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/08/breathing-earth/
EXCELENT
sgsmith
(398 posts)Titled "Earth from Space". Documents several Earth watching satellites and what they've been able to record. Things like dust storms from the Sahara providing necessary minerals needed for the Amazon rain forest to survive.
Earth really is a living, breathing organism on many different levels.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/earth-from-space.html
FirstLight
(13,352 posts)wow, it makes me want to breathe right along with Her (Gaia)...
we humans sure do know how to screw things up don't we? because this planet is so damn beautiful and perfect, and yet we can destroy millennia of synchronistic evolution in a heartbeat as well.
burrowowl
(17,607 posts)FiveGoodMen
(20,018 posts)By the time it got to the lightening, I was really looking at earth differently.
Mojorabbit
(16,020 posts)dickthegrouch
(3,151 posts)I hope someone collates pics from each year so that the damage over time can be seen.
Rumold
(69 posts)love_katz
(2,562 posts)I love science.
And even more, I LOVE Mother Earth!
toby jo
(1,269 posts)Pretty cool - a trip around the sun for each beat.