There’s no sea ice in those images. Remember that they’re composites. The reflectance data that we use for land is not processed over the deep water oceans, you’ll notice theyre a solid color. One solution is to add separate sea ice data back in. Unfortunatley, it’s very, very difficult to distinguish ice from clouds–the best way to do it is with microwaves. Microwaves have much much longer wavelengths than visible light, so the maps are much lower resolution. It just doesn’t make sense to merge them.

And yes, I’m the same Rob Simmon. I should mention that more credit should go to Reto Stöckli and the NASA data processing teams than me, since they do the hard work.

@36 CR Follow my final link from my post above. And poke around on the Earth Observatory, we have a lot of images of Australia. One member of our team grew up there.

@26. & 30 Timo : Interesting – thanks.

So how come we know Suomi as Finland in the English speaking world – why did it end up with that name instead?

@32. Rob Simmon : Cheers for those links.

Is it just me or are the maps in that first link missing all the sea ice in the Arctic? Is that real or an artefact of the image processing – or am I not looking closely enough?

PS. Would you happen to be the same person as in the “Science Fridays – Creating Earth” video?

http://www.sciencefriday.com/videos/watch/10425

On the making of these images!

or this?
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=42805

and finally, Australia (scroll down a bit):
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/BlueMarble/BlueMarble_history.php

Anyhoo, still an inspiring pair of pictures.

I did some googling and there’s a link to Finland in the name of the satellite: it got it’s name to honor the late Verner Suomi who’s parents moved to USA from Finland:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verner_E._Suomi

‘Suomi’ is the name of Finland (the country) in our own language.

That’s interesting I never knew or heard that word before. You have some really great images on your Flickr account too

Also wishing to see more such mosaics incl. one of Oz plus the poles on views – south & north.

@Wouter: It looks like there’s the markings of another band on the far western edge of the image. But mathematically, there should be bands like that, evenly spaced, all the way around the planet if they stitched together an entire globe. It probably has more to do with the time to make an orbit than the number of orbits they used in producing one image.

But if you look at the cloud formations and the coloring I think the original blue marble just seems more beautiful, more majestic.

The image prompted me to look for some images of Earth I was shown at school during the 70′s, the Apollo picture that you had linked to was the one I remember most.

What strikes me about the difference between the two images of Earth, the new one above and the Apollo image from a few decades ago, is the difference in the cloud-scapes. The Apollo image sees the cloud-scapes on Earth at the time, as really defined, I mean there appears to be more definition and structure in the cloud forms of that time period.

When I compare that to the new image above, it’s not that the cloud forms in the latest image lack definiton and structure, it appears to me that those nicely defined cloud-banks are less in number than the 70′s image. The cloud-scapes of the new image seem to be dominated by clouds that I can only describe as frenetic in appearence.

When I was a kid, I remember looking up and following my old mans gaze, hearing his description of a sky that didn’t know wether it wanted to rain, snow or blow, as “a confused sky”. The clouds over the Indian Ocean remind me of that.

If climate change is legit, wouldn’t that change be represented in the overall structure of the cloud-scapes we see around Earth changing over time?

Compare the latest mosaic above, side-byside with the earlier Apollo image and look at the structure and coverage of large fluffy cloud banks as opposed to wispy stratospheric looking stuff that is neither here nor there, so to speak. Apart from a couple of cyclonic structures, the ‘sky’ looks shattered.

Still beautiful nonetheless.

“not [sic] only is there significantly less ice at the southern pole in the mosaic image as compared to the Apollo 17 image, but there’s also a lot less greenery on the African continent. Dayum, humans suck!”

In fairness, remember that that could be due to seasonal factors if one image was taken during winter and the other in summer. Not sure whether or not that’s the case.

EDIT : Wiki-check notes Apollo 17 flew in December 1972 so southern hemisphere’s early summer.

Also as #16 OtherRob has noted already there’s also the slightly different angles to consider.

I take your point though still. Yes Humans are having some visible effects on earth even as seen from space – the shrinkage of the Aral sea (also Lake Chad and /or a few others if memory serves) ,desertification, deforestation and the reduced and ever reducing sea ice area in the Arctic especially to name a few.

I suspect that if sentient aliens are watching from vast distances through incredibly powerful scopes they might well falsely conclude that we are a desert loving species deliberateley trying to “terrafrom” our planet into a more desert state.

Well blue is right but not marble – I think basalt is a bit more common making up more of Earth’s rocks!