The European Space Agency, through its Globcarbon project, has produced an animated gif showing the vegetation cycle of the planet from 1999 to 2002. Spring never looked so green! This is part of ESA’s attempt to chart ten years of the Earth's vegetation. Half way through the project, the work already relies on a stupendous amount of data and processing: “In processing terms we had about 45 terabytes of input data and 18 terabytes of output data, and within the process generated about one petabyte of intermediate data. We developed the necessary software and had about 25 computers and 25 terabytes of disks continuously running for one year from start to finish.”

By way of WorldChanging