Visualizations by
Greg Shirah
Released on October 12, 2015
This animation was designed to be shown as an introductory piece when discussing the concept of Earth Systems Science. Earth science can be divided into broad categories of study including: air (atmosphere), water/ice (hydrosphere/cryosphere), land (lithosphere), life (biosphere), and solar (heliosphere). NASA studies each of these broad categories of Earth system science. Representative stills are wrapped to the multiple spheres next to the labels. The data sets shown on the individual globes are as follows (left to right):