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Visiting the most vulnerable place on Earth: the ‘doomsday glacier’ – PBS Newshour (2020)

October 5, 2020 at 4:45 pm / Global Patterns, Nova Documentaries, PBS Nature

For a little over more than 33 million years, the Antarctic continent remained an exceptionally isolated land mass due to the Antarctic Circumpolar Current that forms a thermal shield around it. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the strongest ocean current on our planet flowing without obstruction from any other land masses. Unfortunately human induced global warming is changing all that and the effects of the climate change is being felt at both poles of the planet through a phenomenon known […]

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NOAA Hurricane Hunters – PBS NewsHour (2018)

July 31, 2020 at 10:11 pm / Global Patterns, PBS Nature, Video

Every hurricane season a fleet of “Hurricane Hunter” planes are deployed to “airtruth” the atmospheric conditions of storms long before they make a landfall. A pair of Lockheed P3 Orion turboprop planes nicknamed “Kermit and “Miss Piggy” are among them. Hurricane Hunter missions are crucial to verify and fine-tune satellite measurements. Hurricane Hunters fly directly into the hurricanes and traverse the eye of the storm several times in order to collect atmospheric data equipped with airborne Doppler weather radar. During […]

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Observations and Simulations of 2005 Atlantic Hurricane Season by NASA

July 25, 2020 at 8:53 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Global Patterns, NatureDocumentaries.org, Video

Atlantic hurricane season typically starts from June 1 and ends in November 30 in the northern Atlantic. There’s a noticeable peak from late August through September. Each season peak activity occurs around September 10th. The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season had an unusually high cyclone activity surpassing any other season. The number of category 5 hurricanes, and the most intense hurricane ever measured (Hurricane Wilma) by atmospheric pressure was recorded during this time period. The visualization ’27 Storms: Arlene to Zeta’ […]

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Life’s Rocky Start – PBS/NOVA (2016)

July 12, 2020 at 3:33 pm / Evolution, Global Patterns, Nova Documentaries, Video

Geology and biological evolution of life influence each other tightly. The title of the documentary “Life’s Rocky Start” reflects this relationship superbly. The six stage transformation of our planet from black, gray, blue, red, white to green is a wonderfully concise way of outlining the geological and biological evolution. More than half of the minerals now incorporated into the upper crust of our planet were produced by living organisms. The movement of continental plates has played a fundamental role in […]

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ORBIT – Seán Doran (2018)

December 23, 2019 at 8:33 pm / Global Patterns

ORBIT compiled by Seán Doran is a wonderfully poetic “out of the world” representation of global patterns based on observations from the International Space Station. The film leverages NASA’s Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth program. NatureDocumentaries.org always endorses the motto “Science can be beautiful and art can be informative”. The International Space Station experiences on average 16 sunrises in a typical 24 hour period. It circles the Earth in between 92-93 minutes. You can learn more about the travel […]

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In Nomine Terra Calens: In the Name of a Warming Earth – Lucy Jones (2019)

October 9, 2019 at 2:33 pm / Global Patterns, Human Nature, Video

Science can be beautiful. Art can be informative. The urgency of climate change is a pressing issue of our time. Scientists have done their job superbly demonstrating causes for why and how our planet is warming due to Human activities. They have done it by making long term measurements of atmospheric CO2 levels and deep drilling of polar ice cores. The scientific facts are all very clear indicating excessive fossil fuel use must end. However the message is clearly not […]

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MOSAiC Expedition: An Arctic Odyssey of Climate Scientists

September 25, 2019 at 5:14 pm / Global Patterns, Video

Since Captain Cook’s time (the collier bark Endeavor was the first scientific research vessel in history) ship expeditions have been extremely influential to understand our world. In an age of anthropogenic climate change the Arctic has remained the most understudied component of the global circulation system. Human induced global warming is exerting its effects on both poles of the planet. Now the time has come and the international Arctic drift expedition known as MOSAiC Expedition (Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the […]

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Weekly Changes in Arctic Sea Ice Age During 1984 – 2019 | NASA/SVS (2019)

September 24, 2019 at 10:02 pm / Global Patterns, Video

NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) has produced an animation showing the sea ice dynamics in the Arctic. The diminishing ratio of multi-year sea ice is staggering. Human contribution to global warming is well documented. The response of the polar regions to heating especially in the Arctic is extremely fast. While scientists are rushing to predict future temperature and precipitation using exceedingly complex climate models, the behavior of the cryosphere is a curious one. We are already witnessing rather large glacial […]

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Perpetual Ocean from NASA

July 27, 2019 at 1:49 pm / Global Patterns, NatureDocumentaries.org, Video

Understanding large-scale global climate and local weather patterns is life saving. Majority of our planet is covered by oceans therefore understanding ocean dynamics is key for making climatic forecasts. Here you can watch four interrelated animations produced by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio in a single video. All animations are based on simulations of high resolution satellite data on an impressively realistic General Circulation Model (GCMs) that NASA uses called ECCO2 (Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean Phase II). […]

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Climate Change – The Facts / David Attenborough – BBC (2019)

April 23, 2019 at 8:46 pm / BBC documentaries, Global Patterns, Human Nature, Video

This documentary has a very urgent message (so urgent that I don’t even have time to write up an accompanying text about it!). It is a call to arms. Climate change from global warming due to Human activities is now a well-established fact. Global atmospheric carbon dioxide level is now more than 410 ppm. In fact, you can check the most up to date atmospheric CO2 reading from Hawaii yourself. We have less than a decade to curb our emissions […]

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OSIRIS-REx Mission to Asteroid Bennu – NASA (2018)

December 7, 2018 at 6:21 pm / Cosmological, Global Patterns, Video

How did our Sun, the Earth, and the planets form and evolve? Asteroids and comets are the early building blocks of the solar system. They even may hold clues to how life has started on our and perhaps in other planets. The asteroid Bennu contains information going back to four and a half billion years. Visitation and sample collection from asteroid Bennu will be very informative. Here you can watch a concatenation of four videos produced by the NASA Goddard […]

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Welcome to the Anthropocene – a Film About the State of the Planet – UN Rio+20 Summit (2012)

October 17, 2018 at 1:03 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Global Patterns, Human Nature, Video

Due to Human activities our planet has now reported to have entered into a “no analog state”. This means our planet has never experienced fast changing present-day conditions in its geological and evolutionary history. The closest geological event to what is happening now is known as (PETM) Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. PETM took place 56 million years ago. Changes happening now is way too fast, much faster than those in PETM. We are indeed in a no analog state in ecological […]

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Siccar Point: The Birthplace of Modern Geology – British Geological Survey

August 19, 2018 at 8:56 pm / Global Patterns, Video

The World was a rather different place in the late 18th century. A great majority of people in the West believed the Earth was not older than 6,000 years old. Rocks were formed immediately after the Biblical flood of Noah. Fossils were simply the remains of animals that had died in the flood. Scientific facts that are so obvious to us today such as plate tectonics and continental drift were not connected. For instance, a core tenet is the geological […]

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REDD+ on the Threshold – Gemma Sethsmith (2011)

August 3, 2018 at 8:44 am / Ecological Documentaries, Global Patterns, Human Nature, Video

The promise of REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) is fairly straightforward: Forest owners keep their standing vegetation intact and in return get compensated by polluters. There are already established strong protective traditions in some local communities such as the indigenous Mayan cantones in the state of Totonicapán, Guatemala, Kichwa tribe of the Ecuador and many others around the World. REDD+ is an economical model developed by Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) […]

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7 Ways Blockchain Can Stop Climate Change & Save The Environment – WEF (2017)

April 13, 2018 at 3:18 pm / Global Patterns, Human Nature, Video

This World Economic Forum video outlines many uses of blockchain technology for environmental protection. The system created can also protect many local tibal communities vulnerable to resource extraction. From Conquistadors to robber barons to oil and gas companies natural resources of tropical regions have been unsustainably harvested and exploited. It doesn’t have to be this way. We must prevent this. Take for instance the Earth Bank of Codes initiative. This ambitious collaborative aims to assign every piece of biological data […]

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