Fifty years ago today, astronauts on Apollo 17, NASA’s last crewed mission to the Moon, took an iconic photo of our planet. The image, called the Blue Marble, took its place on the dusty shelves of history as the first photo frame showing the Earth in full light taken by a person. Now, scientists have re-enacted this frame with a supercomputer and turned it into a video.
The iconic photograph of Earth, the Blue Marble, was taken with a Hasselblad camera on December 7, 1972, by the Apollo 17 crews on their way back. Known as the most reproduced image in history, the Blue Marble provided great support to the growing environmental movement in the 70s.
Blue Marble revived
Now, scientists have recreated this image during a test run of a cutting-edge digital climate model. The model is capable of simulating climate events such as storms and ocean eddies at 1 kilometer resolution, 100 times sharper than typical global simulations.To reconstruct the swirling winds of the Blue Marble, the researchers uploaded the weather records from 1972 to the supercomputer-powered software. The resulting world revealed distinctive features of the region, such as the rising waters off the Namibian coast and the long, reed-like cloud cover. Visualization processes were performed with Nvidia Omniverse.
High-resolution climate models are getting more and more complex, experts say. Therefore, the development of such simulations is more consistent and important for predicting the future climate of the Earth. In addition, the European Union’s Destination Earth project aims to create a “digital twin” of the Earth, thus making better predictions.
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