Home Consumer NASA Satellites Watch Earth ‘Breathe’ in Awesome Time-Lapse Video

NASA Satellites Watch Earth ‘Breathe’ in Awesome Time-Lapse Video

Nov 17, 2017

aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zcGFjZS5jb20vaW1hZ2VzL2kvMDAwLzA3MS85MDcvb3JpZ2luYWwvbW9sbHdlaWRlX2N5Y2xlLmdpZj8xNTEwNzk5Mzk3 — A NASA visualization shows 20 years of continuous satellite observations of plant life on land and at the ocean's surface from 1997 to 2017. Vegetation on land is represented on a scale from brown (low vegetation) to dark green (lots of vegetation). In the ocean, populations of phytoplankton are indicated on a scale from purple (low) to yellow (high). Credit: NASA

A cool new time-lapse video of Earth reveals how our planet has changed over the last two decades as NASA satellites continuously monitored the populations of plant life on land and in the oceans.

The video shows Earth “breathing” repetitiously as the seasons change throughout each year, with snow coverage on the North and South Poles periodically growing and shrinking while green regions of vegetation do the same.

Meanwhile, clouds of microscopic phytoplankton, a type of algae, bloom on the ocean’s surface, where the tiny organisms turn water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and sugar as they bask in sunlight. [Earth’s Plant Life from Space in Photos: NASA Satellite Images]

“These are incredibly evocative visualizations of our living planet,” Gene Carl Feldman, an oceanographer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. “That’s the Earth, that is it breathing every single day, changing with the seasons, responding to the sun, to the changing winds, ocean currents and temperatures.”

The SeaWiFS satellite, launched in 1997, measures the amount of phytoplankton that blooms on Earth’s ocean surfaces. Here, SeaWiFS data show how phytoplankton in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean responded to the transition between El Niño and La Niña conditions in 1998. Higher concentrations of phytoplankton are represented in purple and lower concentrations are pictured in yellow.
Credit: NASA

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