Time-lapse videos are a dime a dozen these days, or so it seems. It takes a lot for one to stand out.

That’s why NASA’s video, released earlier this week, of how the Earth has changed over the past 20 years, was so stunning. It makes it look almost as though Earth is breathing. The implication is that our home planet is a living being, both beautiful and fragile.

Naturally, climate-science deniers have taken to message boards — on YouTube and elsewhere — accusing NASA of playing to the climate-change crowd, but anyone with a sense of wonder can’t help but be moved by what they see.

NASA scientists created the time-lapse video from data recorded by satellites orbiting the Earth, and shows how life has changed during a time of great social, economic and geopolitical upheaval. The “breathing” effect is caused by repetition of the seasons, as they change throughout each year.

The colour green represents life on land. Turquoise represents microscopic organisms in the ocean. And white represents winter snows followed by spring thaws. Heat moves around the planet, sea ice grows and shrinks, and vegetation blooms and recedes, changing with the seasons.

That may seem obvious, even to climate-science deniers, but what lends the time-lapse video scientific weight is that it reveals the behaviour of oceans and land simultaneously, over two decades.

“We’ve never had date like this before,” NASA earth scientist Compton Tucker said in a video statement. “Half of all photosynthesis occurs in the oceans, and the other half on land. Having these data to show both at the same time — day after day, month after monthly, year after year, for 20 years — is a great tool to study life on Earth.”

Researchers can both monitor ocean and forest heath, and track conditions in fisheries and agriculture at the same time, to see if there are any connections.

“You can see greening of the Arctic,” NASA oceanographer Jeremy Werdell added, in a video statement from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “You can see earlier summers, later winters. The view from space has opened our eyes to many different things.”

The project was designed in part to measure the environmental contrasts between El Nino and La Nina, when tropical ocean temperatures in the Pacific shift from being warmer than average to cooler.

Those shifts have far-reaching implications on climate patterns throughout the planet, from severe droughts in California and the Pacific Northwest to more volatile monsoons in South Asia and disruptive rain patterns in food-producing regions as far away as the Horn of Africa.

As with all science, small details play a large role in shaping the big picture. The time-lapse video shows, for example, how phytoplankton growth in the oceans can have a dramatic impact on dry land. The satellites found plankton blooming in ocean regions previously thought to be devoid of life.

The Sea-Viewing Wide Field-of-View Sensor (SeaWiFS), as it’s known officially, was launched in 1997, and spent the next decades and more looking down on us from orbit 700 kilometres (about 435 miles) overhead. The satellite’s original purpose was to collect data on the bio-optical properties of the Earth’s land masses and oceans, but it also watched the Blue Planet’s living colours change with the seasons — hence the time-lapse video released for public view.

Past is prologue. For researchers, long-term trends in the past help provide a glimpse of things to come in the near future. Satellite data is used to monitor the health of agricultural crops, rainforests and ocean fisheries around the world, with a mind to hopefully being able to forecast future disasters.

The difference between now and 1997, when the SeaWiFS satellite was launched, is that technology has advanced to the point where sensors can pick up the finer details at wavelengths that can reveal what’s going on at a chemical level. Changes in the light reflected from plants, for example, can reveal the exact moment when photosynthesis is converting carbon dioxide and water into sugars.

Climate change isn’t just about receding polar ice caps: The NASA survey has also revealed the expansion of so-called “biological deserts,” uninhabitable regions that have grown markedly in the past two decades.

Meanwhile, green shrubs are expanding their reach into areas once believed to be too cold to sustain life.

“The ability to expand your senses into space,” Werdell said, “compress time; watch visualizations like these; see how the ecosystems of land, sea, atmosphere and ice all interact; and then be able to rewind it and watch it again and again — it’s amazing.”

Fewer than 350,000 chimpanzees remain in the wild, down sharply from the two million believed to have roamed the rainforests of central Africa only a century ago.

These are estimates only, of course, but one doesn’t need a degree in earth science — or statistics — to know that habitat loss, illegal logging and the bushmeat trade are a continuing threat to one of humankind’s closest genetic relatives.

©Michael "Nick" Nichols for National Geographic

What is less known — until now — is that a recent, unique collaboration between the Jane Goodall Institute and NASA is boosting knowledge of what’s happening and, more importantly, how and where it’s happening.

Behavioural scientists with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other groups have being doing a credible job of tracking known family groups of chimpanzees, ever since Jane Goodall made her first visit to Tanzania’s Gombe region in 1960. Conservationists have mapped both chimpanzees’ territories — a family group’s immediate neighbhourhood — and their home ranges, the area chimpanzees roam outside their territories in their search for food, potential mates and other family groups.

In orbit, meanwhile, NASA has recorded the hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute changes to the earth’s surface for the past 44 years. Some of the most technologically advanced satellites have been placed in orbit in just the past two years.

Until recently, conservation groups and NASA worked at cross purproses. Information was gathered, but not shared. Thanks to the Goodall Institute, a new program of cooperation now makes it possible for primate researchers to monitor the environmental effects of habitat loss on individual family groups on a day-by-day basis.

©NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio/Cindy Starr

This is important to chimpanzees’ future survival in the wild because behavioural scientists can now predict with a degree of certainty which family groups will be affected by proposed development projects, and how. The shared information can also be used as evidence in court cases brought against illegal loggers and rogue mining operations.

The bad news is that habitat loss is visible from space. The good news is that, by knowing how, when and where and environmental destruction is taking place, law-enforcement agencies and regulators now have real, tangible information on which to act.

The Landsat series of satellites, a joint mission of NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has been providing a continuous record of earth’s land use for more than four decades now. Images taken from orbit have been made available cost-free to the public: the Landsat program is a truly democratic, people-driven program.

“NASA satellite data helps us understand what it means to be a chimp by overlaying distribution of the habitat with chimpanzee behaviuor and ranging data," Lilian Pintea, vice-president of conservation science for the Goodall Institute, said in a statement for the NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center.

Chimpanzees once lived in an uninterrupted belt of woodland rain forests from Lake Tanganyika westward through Uganda and the Congo Basin.

In the 1970s, little more than a decade after Goodall first arrived in the region, the forest started to be cut down.

Increased population growth, driven in part by rural poverty, has exacerbated forest clearing for farmland and charcoal production.

The Goodall Institute is using the Landsat images to convince villagers in the area that conservation is in their best interests.

Goodall, now in her 80s, is still active with her namesake institute, though her primary role is now focused on education, fundraising and lecture tours around the world. She still tries to return to Gombe once a year, though. She’s noticed a direct effect the Landsat program has had on local opinion.

“It was exciting to see the impact of these images on the villagers,” Goodall said in a statement for the NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center.

Villagers could identify landmarks and sacred places in the satellite imagery, she added.

“It was like a piece of reality dropped magically from the sky.”

If the chimpanzee is to be saved in the wild, it will require concerted efforts on the ground, not just from space.

For now, though, the satellite images are proving to be a game changer for improving local conservation efforts.

Journal

“Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save the remnants of his past.”

— Peter Matthiessen

‘It’s amazing’ — how new NASA time-lapse video shows the Earth breathing.

How satellite technology is helping save the chimpanzee.

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