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“As soon as we made it beyond the limits of our atmosphere, one of the first things we did was turn around our cameras around and look at this (the Earth),” begins a video (above) released by NASA. It has been presented as the “most complete view of global biology to date.”

In the autumn of 1997, NASA launched the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS), which then began a 20-year-long project (still going on) to continuously monitor life on planet Earth. And what makes this exploration so special?

“While most satellite missions capture data on the physical characteristics of our planet’s climate and weather, this measures life itself,” NASA has explained. The space pioneers have continuously monitored the changing plant life on the surface of the land and ocean.

What looks like a repetitious ebb and flow on the landforms and the ocean’s surface is actually a visual depiction of how our planet is “breathing”. The data set makes it easier for scientists to predict the future of our planet in terms of how ecosystems will respond to changing climate and broad-scale changes in human interaction with the land.

“These are incredibly evocative visualisations of our living planet,” said Gene Carl Feldman, an oceanographer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “That’s the Earth, that is it breathing every single day, changing with the seasons, responding to the Sun, to the changing winds, ocean currents and temperatures.”