Dima Balakirevs beautiful drone footage of Iceland, showcases the Island’s magnificant waterfalls, geothermal features, and lava formations.
In a similar vein, Scott Sporlede and Ross Borden have created another video of Jordan highlighting its stunning features from the ancient ruins of Petra to the mind-blowing rock formations of Wadi Rum.
(h/t boingboing)
Fascinating BBC documentary exploring the idea that what we think is real may just be a cosmic hologram, and our world is just a set of mathematical equations we cannot fully understand.
(h/t boingboing)
This extraordinary timelapse from Google Earth Engine showcases the impact of human activity on the planet over the past 28 years. Highlights include a glacier shrinking, the expansion of a major US city and the deforestation of a rainforest.
(h/t broadsheet)
The folks over at wait but why have created a fantastic series of charts representing different timescales in history. They seek to put a wide range of historical moments into a time perspective.
From the blog:
Humans are good at a lot of things, but putting time in perspective is not one of them.It’s not our fault—the spans of time in human history, and even more so in natural history, are so vast compared to the span of our life and recent history that it’s almost impossible to get a handle on it…To try to grasp some perspective, I mapped out the history of time as a series of growing timelines—each timeline contains all the previous timelines (colors will help you see which timelines are which).
For the full series of charts, head to wait but why.
(h/t boingboing)
NASA, TIME and Google, have teamed up to create a fascinating time-lapse video showcasing the rapid urbanisation of some of the world’s largest cities. The images come from orbiting satellites as part of NASA’s Landsat program. This program monitors how humans are rapidly altering the surface of the planet, through the use of eight satellites which between them have collected millions of images since 1984.
More at ArchDaily
Glenn Walker’s superb timelapse showcasing the beauty and majesty of Norther Australia.
Walker explains:
Shot over 2 months and made up of over 13 000 photos, this is my timelapse piece canvassing the beauty and magic of Australia’s Top End. The video includes the Top End’s most iconic national parks such as Kakadu, Litchfield, Nitmiluk and Limmen, as well as other well-known local natural sites including Darwin’s East Point and Ludmilla Bay, and the Daly River.
(h/t broadsheet)
PBS’s UnderH20 series takes a breathtaking journey through the microscopic world of corals and their fantastic biology.
Corals are beautiful when seen through your own eyes in sunlight, but for scientists at the University of Hawaii, seeing corals in this manner is not enough. They are using a revolutionary new tool called a laser scanning confocal microscope to take photographs of corals that are one part art and one part science. In this episode, they take us along for a ride with this amazing new technology and show us corals in a way we have never seen them before.
(h/t boingboing)
A superbly informative Ted-Ed animation from Scott Gass explaining the immensity of planet earth’s ‘one big ocean’. Some astonishing facts here – “The oceans hold the greatest geological features of our planet” including the largest waterfall, mountain and mountain range.
(h/t broadsheet)
The beauty and expansiveness of the night sky can be mesmerizing. Two short time-lapses from Michael Shainblum (“Existence“) and Randy Halverson (“Horizons”) perfectly illustrate this majesty which we too often take for granted. Expand to full screen and enjoy.
(h/t slate)
Horizons from Randy Halverson on Vimeo.
(h/t slate)
A time lapse video from the Curiosity Rover, created with the Raw Images available at http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw.
Created by using only Full Data Product from the Front Left Hazcam and covers the period between Sol 0 (August 8th, 2012) and Sol 281 (May 21st, 2013).
(h/t mashable)
Infographics