It’s these kinds of views that stick with you forever. Did you get any pictures of that, Jack? Oh, yeah. We got some pictures earlier. I’m gonna get another one here in a minute.
I’ll tell you, if there ever was a fragile or very deep blue in space as the Earth right now These animations starting from 1992 of East Asia show the scale of rapid economic development and industrialization. They relate also to massive increases in local air pollution. This industrial growth from 2014 has emitted around the same amount of carbon dioxide as The United Kingdom since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the middle of the eighteenth century. By comparison, such greenhouse gas emissions are also visible in North America. The city of Ariquemes is currently home to just under 10,000 people.
Ariquemes was built in the Amazon Basin, which is the highest biodiversity of any region on the planet. Seen here is the rapid conversion of virgin tropical forest to produce crops such as soybeans. Over the last four years, an area twice the size of the state of Massachusetts has been destroyed. From this 1972 image, we move to the Aral Sea where we can observe its shrinkage from 1975 to the present day. During the era of the Soviet planned economy, the rivers feeding the Aral Sea were diverted to irrigate the newly planted cotton fields.
This provided work for the local farmers but led to the desertification of what was once the fourth largest inland lake on the planet. The Arctic is one of the last remaining pristine environments on the Earth. Sea ice sustains a complex ecosystem which preserves and protects life. Since the nineteen seventies, this protective layer of sea ice has systematically reduced in area, warming the water by up to eight degrees Celsius and causing substantial threats to the region’s ecosystems as well as affecting the warming of the whole planet. Since 2015, NASA’s been operating the Deep Space Climate Observatory with its Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera, known as EPIC, viewing the whole Earth in full sunlight, just like the view captured by the Blue Marble photograph.
The difference is that EPIC is 1,000,000 miles from the Earth and captures these images every two hours. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Blue Marble photograph, NASA acquired epic images every thirteen minutes for three hours as shown here. Living Earth Orchestra has been developing near real time technology to allow us to broadcast images of the whole planet everywhere all the time. These LEO images will be available for anyone who cares about their local environment. LEO plans to build a constellation of satellites to capture the whole Earth day and night at up to a hundred feet in resolution to provide a verifiable source of independent information.
Visit our website at living earth orchestra dot com.