in

NASA illustrates the rise in temperatures since 1880 in just 30 seconds

Credits: Screenshot YouTube / NASA Climate Change

It can be hard to grasp the extent of the climate change affecting the Earth at the moment. But the undeniable fact is that the planet is heating up on a global scale that has never before been seen by humans. However, it is possible to understand it and see it with your own eyes in this video that was recently published by NASA. 

In just 36 seconds, this video illustrates the history of the temperature of the surface of the Earth. The data begins in 1880, at which time we had just started to record temperatures, and it continues up until 2017, during which the hottest temperatures ever were recorded, according to NASA. The American agency has collated the data regarding temperatures on the surface of the planet, from a vast network of 6,300 meteorological stations, ships, buoys and research bases in the Antarctic.

The colour code is very simple. In the 19th century, and for the first half of the 20th century, temperatures fluctuated significantly across the map: blue in certain regions, orange and red in others where the temperatures were higher. But from the 1980s onwards, we can see radical changes. The globe becomes slowly submerged in waves of heat. And the trend intensifies further over from 2013 to 2017, which are officially the five hottest years ever recorded. “We do not predict heat records every year, but the current trend towards long term global warming is clear”, stated Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute, a few months ago.

This recent video is an updated version of an image which was published last year:

As you can also see in the video, global warming does not happen at the same rate depending on the area, particularly due to meteorological phenomena such as El Nino or La Nina, with a clearly more pronounced effect in the Northern hemisphere, and more particularly in the polar regions, which are in the front line.

Source