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Watch: 20 years of the living, breathing Earth revealed


Digital writers
theweathernetwork.com

Friday, November 24, 2017, 10:14 AM - Alone among the worlds of our solar system, Earth is famously a living planet. And it seems the best way to see that is by taking a really big step back and watching it change for a couple of decades.

Earlier this month, NASA released 20 years' worth of orbital scans of our planet from its Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) satellite. Launched in 1997, it's been monitoring Earth's life signs both on land and at sea, chronicling the life cycles of forests, near-surface sea plant matter and other effects visible from orbit.

It's mesmerizing to watch, and simple to interpret. On land, the darker the shade of green, the thicker the vegetation, and the shades move back and forth from north to south and back again as the seasons turn. At sea, phytoplankton blooms as it is carried along by ocean currents.

With 20 years of data to go by, it's easy to track changes, and as the world warms, NASA says it's spotted plenty of climate change's effects, from the greening of the Arctic, to the expansion of what it calls "biological deserts," poor in living organisms, in its oceans. It is even able to use these signs to track the warm waters of El Nino, and their effects on ocean life.

"For me, that was the first demonstration of the power of this kind of observation, to see how the ocean responds to one of the most significant environmental perturbations it could experience, over the course of just a few weeks," NASA oceanographer Gene Carl Feldman said in a release from the agency. "It also showed that the ocean and all the life within it is amazingly resilient — if given half a chance."

Watch below: NASA's video showing the satellite's full effects



MORE: A year of hurricanes, from space



SOURCE: NASA

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