A newer version of this visualization is available.
Draining the Oceans
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- Visualizations by:
- Horace Mitchell
- View full credits
Animation of the draining of the Earth's oceans. The first frame indicates no decrease and the second frame drains all water above sea level. Each subsequent frame represents a 10 meter drop in the level of the Earth's oceans. The high resolution frames labeled 'Mask' can be used with the individual images below to create higher resolution versions of this animation.
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Animation of ocean draining with sea level annotation.
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This video is also available on our YouTube channel.

Shaded relief image of the Earth's topography and bathymetry
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Next Generation Blue Marble image for July subsampled to match the shaded relief map.
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Land-sea mask matching the Blue Marble image above.
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Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
U.S. Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Geophysical Data Center, 2006, 2-minute Gridded Global Relief Data (ETOPO2v2) - http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/fliers/06mgg01.html
The Blue Marble Next Generation data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC) and NASA's Earth Observatory.
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Animator
- Horace Mitchell (NASA/GSFC) [Lead]
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Datasets used in this visualization
ETOPO2 (A.K.A. 2-minute Gridded Global Relief Data)
Terra and Aqua BMNG (A.K.A. Blue Marble: Next Generation) (Collected with the MODIS sensor)
Credit: The Blue Marble data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC).
Dataset can be found at: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/
See more visualizations using this data setNote: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.