This Pulsing Earth : Krulwich Wonders... : NPR
It’s breathing, he thought. “All of a sudden I see a thing with a heartbeat.”
[…]
After working a few hours on getting the cartographic mumbo jumbo out of the way (projection, coloration, atmospheric haze, and stuff), I first got to see the frames flicker in front of me, and I just stared at it as it looped over and over again. Something that I was familiar with as a static thing was now pulsing and alive and I didn’t expect to feel so locked into it. And it’s hard for me to even describe how I felt about it without sounding ridiculous or sentimental. It’s just an animated GIF.
I of course had some expectation of what I would see as a result of animating these frames. But I didn’t expect to be so mesmerized by them. I can’t look away.
So what we’ve learned here today is: each of Earth’s deep breaths lasts one year.
We are immeasurably tiny.
