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All the Water on Planet Earth
Illustration Credit & Copyright: Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Howard Perlman, USGS
Explanation: How much of planet Earth is made of water? Very little, actually. Although oceans of water cover about 70 percent of Earth’s surface, these oceans are shallow compared to the Earth’s radius. The above illustration shows what would happen is all of the water on or near the surface of the Earth were bunched up into a ball. The radius of this ball would be only about 700 kilometers, less than half the radius of the Earth’s Moon
(via n-a-s-a)
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I Love This New Stunning HD View of Earth So Much I Could Hug it
Before you go any further, make that video 1080 and go as big as your processor will let you.
Elektro-L is a Russian weather satellite currently sitting in geostationary orbit at 36,000 km above the Indian Ocean. This video represents almost one week of images as observed from that satellite, one shot every half hour.
How does this stunning view differ from other “blue disk” shots? For one thing, it’s incredibly high-definition (121 megapixels, with each pixel equating to about 1 km). It’s also the first such image composed from one single image. That’s right, NASA stitches theirs together from many images (not that they aren’t awesome). There’s four light channels combined in this image, the usual red, blue and green as well as infrared (which makes vegetation look orange).
I could watch it for hours. So peaceful.
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Lol This!
HAPPENS TO ME ALL THE TIME
gpoy.
500% accurate.
On a daily basis, yes.
(Source: futurastic, via h-0-r-s-e-s)
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Another great color feature from the BBC: Future site, which also brought you the feature earlier today about whether we all see the same colors. This latest piece asks where the names for colors come from.
Unlike so many other language-based classifications (like having dozens of words that describe snow, or not having a word for “war”), colors are thought to be arise from a natural need to classify a sensory input. In other words, the spectrum is the spectrum and we all see it … every language should have to fill in the names, right?
Wrong. Not only do some cultures just not recognize certain colors (like the fact that blue and green are often not differentiated in Vietnamese), but pre-literate languages seem to adopt colors into their lexicon in a very particular order! Looks like you can’t get a word for “green” without several other steps happening first (like black, white and red).
A fascinating look at where the cultural and neurological aspects of language intersect.
