The Earth’s Seasonal “Heartbeat” as Seen from Space

[n2doc]

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 NASA’s 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 I’ve 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 Nelson’s blog, or see a much larger version of the gif here.

link

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/08/breathing-earth/

[ruvvic_123]

1. HEARTBEAT

EXCELENT

[abelenkpe]

2. K&R

[sgsmith]

3. Watch for a Nova episode on PBS

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]

4. thanks for this!

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]

5. Thanks for heads up!

[FiveGoodMen]

13. That was excellent!

By the time it got to the lightening, I was really looking at earth differently.

[Mojorabbit]

6. This is so cool! nt

[dickthegrouch]

7. Mesmerizing

I hope someone collates pics from each year so that the damage over time can be seen.

[Rumold]

8. http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ NT

[love_katz]

9. K&R...

I love science.

And even more, I LOVE Mother Earth!

[toby jo]

10. Check out that north pole - 'not budging, just gonna sit here & be icy me'.

Pretty cool - a trip around the sun for each beat.

[Wounded Bear]

11. Kind of sad they left off the polar ice cap.....

[Bernardo de La Paz]

12. So glad I caught this. Thanks for posting! nt

[hrmjustin]

14. K&R!