Amazing.. "Pulsing Earth" GIF

Hey all,
Good morning. I found this really cool image of the earth being photo'd from space once a month for a couple of years. It really gives you the impression that the earth is breathing when you see it. As the ice grows during the winter, the the green grows back during the summer.. I tried to resize the images so that I could upload them for you all to see, but the sequence is too long I'm thinking so I have to just give the link...

PULSING EARTH

The link I am giving is to RadioLab, which is an addiction of mine. A couple of the radio shows they have put together are so amazing it's ridiculous. Take a second to check it out, you won't regret it..

I am not very computer savy, so if there is a way to upload the GIF here and someone can pull it off, please feel free.

Originally posted by Quauhtli
Good morning. I found this really cool image of the earth being photo'd from space

Cool as this is, I do wonder how the images are derived, because whtever they are they certainly are not photographs.
No clouds, no ice at the north pole.

Some kind of computer graphic, I think.

reply to post by alfa1


I think it's a really cool optical illusion of pulsation. By focusing on the Great Lakes for instance, one can see the difference including snow.

Originally posted by Quauhtli
I am not very computer savy, so if there is a way to upload the GIF here and someone can pull it off, please feel free.

Here's one of them:

The asymmetry of a lot visible in the North really contrasts with not much happening in the South.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Nice embed.

Maybe nothing much happens in the South because Antarctic is surrounded with more ocean mass than in the North? A water mass tends to freeze faster if it's more small, aka has more land in it.

reply to post by swanne

The North has more land in the zone where snowfall cycles, so that's the main difference.
But even the southern tip of South America doesn't get covered with snow, except on the mountainous west coast.
I think the reason for this might be that the air blowing East is dried out when it passes over the mountains and doesn't have a way to pick up more moisture so that's why there's not much snowfall east of the mountains. That's just a guess though. The rest of the land in the southern hemisphere outside Antarctica may just be too far North.

reply to post by Quauhtli


This is a really neat picture. The statement that it appears as if the Earth is breathing was rather interesting to me. It you think about it, the Earth is composed of mostly silicon. Silicon is an element that has many properties similar to carbon ,and can be found right below it on the periodic table. Carbon being the basic backbone of all organic things on Earth. With that similarity we can perhaps say that planet Earth could also be considered alive. But not in the way that plants and animals are recognized as 'living'. But in a way that caves, forever changing, produce stalactites & stalagmites could be considered alive; since they do have carbon present in their atomic structure.