VIDEO: NASA SHOWS THE EARTH IS A LIVING CREATURE

We've all seen some sort of space station video or images of space, but none of those could prepare you for the video that NASA's Scientific Visualisation Studio released. Using real data, this simulation's volume-rendered clouds depict seven days in 2005 when a category 4 typhoon developed off the coast of China. 

Our planet functions as a single organism that maintains conditions necessary for its survival. Scientists used data from NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5 (GEOS-5), to depict the simulation’s volume-rendered clouds.

This particular run of the simulation, called 7km GEOS-5 Nature Run (7km-G5NR), was executed on a supercomputer. This short visualization produced petabytes of output and referenced nearly a terabyte of brick map files.

Be sure to have a look at the spectacular video below: