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BBC News
22-04-2025
- Science
- BBC News
How 50 years of climate change has changed the face of the 'Blue Marble' from space
The "Blue Marble" was the first photograph of the whole Earth and the only one ever taken by a human. Fifty years on, new images of the planet reveals visible changes to the Earth's surface. "I'll tell you," said astronaut Harrison Schmitt as the Apollo 17 hurtled towards the Moon, "if there ever was a fragile-appearing piece of blue in space, it's the Earth right now". It was Thursday 7 December 1972, that humanity got its first look at our planet as a whole. In that moment, the photograph "The Blue Marble" was taken – one which changed the way we saw our world. "I can see the lights of southern California, Bob," said Schmitt to ground control about one and a half hours into the flight. "Man's field of stars on the Earth is competing with the heavens." The crew of the Apollo 17 – commander Eugene Cernan, command module pilot Ronald Evans and lunar module pilot Harrison "Jack" Schmitt – were watching their home recede into the distance as they journeyed into space for the last manned mission to the Moon. Looking back towards the Earth, Cernan commented: "the clouds seem to be very artistic, very picturesque. Some in clockwise rotating fashion… but appear to be… very thin where you can… see through those clouds to the blue water below." It is an enduring image of the beauty but also the vulnerability of our planet – adrift as it is in the vastness of the Universe, which hosts no other signs of life that we have been able to detect to date. But ours is also a planet of great change. The tectonic movements that shift the landmasses move too slow for our eyes to notice. Yet another force – humanity itself – has been reshaping our planet at a pace that we can see. Urbanisation, deforestation, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are altering the way the Earth looks. So how, over the 50 years since that iconic image was taken, has the Blue Marble changed? Those first images of the Blue Marble were taken by the crew, who passed the onboard camera – a hand-held analogue Hasselblad 500 EL loaded with 70mm Kodak film – between them, captivated by the sight of the Earth from space. "All the images captured with Hasselblads are spectacularly clear and bright," says Jennifer Levasseur, curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. The camera was specially modified for use in space, she adds. Glues, lubricants, moving parts and batteries could all cause problems or fail when exposed to the extremes of hot and cold in space. It was also given a large square shutter-release button so the crew could use it while wearing their cumbersome spacesuits. "The other major modification, was the removal of the viewing screen – because it's extra glass," Levasseur says, The astronauts, "had to learn how to take pictures without being able to see anything", she says. "Without a viewfinder, you can't see what you're taking." Taking photos, says Levasseur, was planned meticulously and written into the mission plan. "They had known previous launches wouldn't give them whole Earth, but on this one the whole Earth would be entirely illuminated by the light of the Sun." It was around five hours and 20 minutes into the flight that the crew got their first glimpse of the entire planet. The crew were starting to get ready for bed, zipping into their sleeping bags. It was their first moment of downtime since the launch. "I suppose we're seeing as 100% full Earth as we'll ever see," said Cernan. "Bob, it's these kind of views that stick with you forever… There's no strings holding it up either. It's out there all by itself." The Blue Marble image was captured at around 29,000km (18,000 miles) from Earth, as the Sun lit up the globe from behind the Apollo 17. Almost six hours into the flight, Schmitt laughed. "The problem with looking at the Earth, particularly Antarctica, is it's too bright," he said, "And so I'm using my sunglasses through the monocular". Back home, it was nearing 05:00 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and ground control was quiet. "I'm not keeping you awake, am I, Bob?" asked Schmitt. "Just keep talking. We're listening," came the voice from the capsule communicator. And so the conversation continued long into the flight, the crew describing the clouds drifting over the ocean and the continents of home. Previous Apollo missions had snapped the Earth partly hidden by shadow. The hugely influential, Earthrise, for instance, shows the planet as it rises behind the Moon. Up until this point, our view of home had been fragmented, with no real way to visualise the planet in its entirety. (Read more about how Earthrise sparked an environmental movement.) Suddenly, glowing in the light of the Sun, the Earth was revealed as a beautiful shining blue orb, full of life and alone in the vastness of space. As a result, the Blue Marble is thought to have had more influence on humanity than any other photograph in history. "If you can't see something, it's hard to visualise that it exists," says Nick Pepin, a climate scientist at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. "I think all of us who have been brought up with that [image] from a young age probably find it difficult to imagine a time when we didn't know what the Earth looked like. This was the first time that we could actually look back from space and see our home – and people suddenly realised it was an amazing thing, but also a fixed system that we live on." The image offers a view of the Earth from the Mediterranean Sea area to the Antarctica South polar ice cap. Heavy cloud hangs over the Southern Hemisphere, and almost the entire coastline of Africa can be seen. Nasa officially credits the image to the entire crew. We may never know which of them actually took it but today it is reported to be one of the most reproduced images of all time. At 07.39 GMT on 7 December 2022 – 50 years later to the minute since the original was taken – a new "Blue Marble" was captured by a satellite orbiting a million miles away. This time, a set of 12 images taken 15 minutes apart, reveal noticeable changes to our planet's surface, the result of 50 years of global warming. In the 50 years that separates these two snapshots in time, one of the most striking differences is the visible reduction in the size of the Antarctic ice sheet. "You can see the shrinking cryosphere – the shrinking ice sheet and the loss of the snow," says Pepin says. This, he says, is a major indicator of climate change. The Sahara Desert has also grown while the rainforest "is retreating further south", he adds. Research has shown that tree cover in the vast Sahel region that borders the Sahara Desert has been in significant decline. "The dominant thing that you can see on the [new] image is deforestation and the loss of vegetation", as the Earth's land cover switches from greenery to desert. The pictures were taken by Nasa's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (Epic), which has been imaging the sunlit side of Earth between 13 and 22 times a day since 2015. The satellite sits at the first Lagrange point, a point of equilibrium between the Sun and Earth, a million miles from Earth. From mid-April to mid-October, one photograph is taken of the Earth roughly every hour, and for the rest of the year it takes an image every two hours, says Alexander Marshak, deputy project scientist for Nasa's Deep Space Climate Observatory (Dscovr) satellite mission, which the camera is carried aboard. "With respect to the Blue Marble, on the 50th anniversary, we decided to take the same images at 15 minute intervals. So, in 15 minutes [the Earth] rotates around maybe 100km (62 miles)," says Marshak. And, thanks to advances in technology, he adds, "we can see the same images, but with much better quality", even from a million miles away. More like this:• 'Earthrise': The photo that sparked an environmental movement• Out of this world: 11 spacewalks that made history• What the planets aligning really means "And we can see much more than that," Marshak adds. "We take images in 10 wavelengths, from UV [ultraviolet] to near infrared. From these images we can retrieve the property of ozone, of clouds, of water. The height of clouds, the location of clouds. We can look at the property of aerosols, the size of particles, the amount of particles. We retrieve even the shape of ice crystals [in the clouds], using the Sun's glint. We can [see] whether they're horizontally or randomly oriented." "We retrieve [data on] the amount of leaves on Earth, and not only that but also the amount of leaves that are directly illuminated by the Sun," says Marshak. This data, combined with observations of ocean surface colour, can allow researchers to determine the rate of all photosynthetic activity on Earth. The Dscovr programme hasn't been running long enough to draw any definitive conclusions, says Marshak, but they are starting to gather data that will provide new insights into how the world is changing – such as changes in cloud cover and height, reflectivity, and vegetation cover. Among the other changes that have occurred since that first image of the entire Earth 50 years ago is the amount of human development and activity on our planet's surface. Although not visible in these images of the daylight side of the Earth, other satellites monitor for lights visible on the dark side of our planet. These show dramatic expansions in the urban sprawl across the continents alongside the activity of shipping on the Earth's oceans. Wildfires also glow across large swathes of the land at night, doubling in frequency in just the past 20 years. Back in 1972, the Blue Marble prompted a mass-reconsideration of our place in the Universe. Astronauts viewing Earth from space have reported a profound feeling of awe, a sense of interconnectedness and environmental awareness, and of self-transcendence. This is called the "overview effect". In the utter vastness of space, the beauty of Earth can be overwhelming. This feeling of intense awe has been found to elicit a fundamental change in thinking, a kind of cognitive realignment also called the "need for accommodation", as the person attempts to this process new perceptual information. "Gobsmackingly – just – wow" is how Helen Sharman, the UK's first astronaut, described her first view of the Earth from space. It was 1991 and the 27-year-old chemist had just launched from Kazakhstan, to begin her journey to the Soviet Mir space station. "We had two windows on the Soyuz spacecraft," she says. "The commander, who sits in the middle, doesn't get a window. But the research cosmonaut, which was my job, and the flight engineer – we both had one. I had the right seat and flight engineer had the left seat. As we were launching, the spacecraft tipped my side very slightly towards the Earth. Immediately, the light streamed through that window." Sharman describes her view of the curvature of the Earth, the "gorgeous blue seas", white clouds, and black space above. The Earth, she says, appeared as if it had its own glow. "The Sun was at quite a low angle, so it would reflect off the sea, and then back up to the clouds – and off the clouds underneath to the Earth. Then [the light] came up so it felt as though the Earth had its own light source." She compares the colour to the "ultramarine of renaissance paintings". "It's quite unlike the rest of nature. It's that brightness against the blackness of space, you just see the Earth as this great big gorgeous blue dot." Then, as her eyes began to adjust to the darkness of space, the stars appeared in their billions. "We know there are probably billions of stars just in one small section of the Milky Way, maybe even trillions. And we think maybe there could be up to a couple of trillion galaxies in the Universe. That [makes you] realise the insignificance of Earth." Sharman experienced these conflicting thoughts all at once. "Our atmosphere is so thin. How easily that whole top layer, where most of life is, could just be wiped away." But, conversely, she adds, "Earth is not the focal point of the Universe." To this day Sharman dreams of "floating along inside one of the modules and stopping by a window, looking out with the other crew". The experience of viewing the Earth from space, she says, "definitely changed my life's priorities". "The most important thing is the people. And of course, the environment and ecology that's required to keep this Earth going." The overview effect, say experts, is long-lasting and more powerful than other instances of awe. For the first time, the Blue Marble gave all of humanity the chance to experience the phenomenon to some degree. In fact, research shows that you can experience the overview effect with both feet firmly on the ground. Like Earthrise, the Blue Marble image became an emblem of the environmental movement. It showed a planet requiring stewardship at the global scale. The Blue Marble was used to illustrate the Gaia hypothesis, developed in the 1960s and '70s, which proposes that Earth and its biological systems act as a huge single entity, that exists in a delicate state of balance. And, although controversial among scientists, the theory kickstarted a holistic approach to Earth Science. The image became a symbol of unity, too, as for the first time we could see the Earth without any human-imagined boundaries that divide us as they do on maps. The Blue Marble was adopted by activist groups like Friends of the Earth and events like Earth Day. Prior to this, environmental campaign images had often focused on pollution or endangered species. The photograph appeared on postage stamps, and in the opening sequence of former US vice president Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, and inspired research into Earth systems with the establishment of climate research institutions such as the Max-Planck Institut, based in Munich, Germany. Looking at the 1972 and 2022 Blue Marble images side-by-side, Pepin describes the Earth's "restless atmosphere". Visible in both images, are clouds formed above the green areas of rainforest, demonstrating the inextricable link between the forests and the rain. "If you look at [central] Africa, you can see that most of the cloud, particularly on the earlier [image] is quite spotty, that indicates thunderstorms. Whereas if you go further north, and look at the Sahara desert, you can see there are no clouds. "When you look from above you see all the connections, the overall relationships between areas," says Pepin. "For example, Kilimanjaro rises from grassland, with snow on top. If you lived on the slopes you might not know there was snow on top and the importance of the connection between those areas." Looking at the Earth from space like this, he says, "makes you appreciate the interlinkages between different parts of the ecosystems". "If you can only see your bit, you might think that environmental problems are only happening somewhere else and assume that 'it's not my problem'," says Pepin. However, the limitation, he says, is scale. "You lose the detail. You need both. You need ground truthing [validating the information in the field] too." There is a "huge fundamental difference" between these two images though, says Levasseur. "One is captured by a human – and one is not. It doesn't have the same impact. And that's really because of the fact that there's no person there." Levasseur is looking forward to the photographs that will be brought home from the next manned mission to go as far as the Moon: Artemis II, planned for 2026. "There's not going to be another whole Earth image in the way I think of it until humans go out away from Earth again. I wasn't alive in 1972. This is going to be a huge moment to know that people are looking at us from that far away." "As much as we like to think of satellites as sort of our surrogates," she says, "I know that there is a person behind that camera, so there is something different about it, and there always will be." -- For essential climate news and hopeful developments to your inbox, sign up to the Future Earth newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week. For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Washington Post
21-03-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
The Wright brothers invented the airplane, right? Not if you're in Brazil.
PETRÓPOLIS, Brazil — Who invented the airplane? Questions don't get much simpler. But in Brazil and the United States, the answer you'll get isn't likely to be the same. In 1903, U.S. schoolchildren are taught, the Wright brothers piloted their Wright Flyer into the air in Kitty Hawk, N.C., and soared into the history books. Brazilians hear a different story: that the true inventor of the airplane was Alberto Santos Dumont — commonly described here as 'the father of aviation.' For more than a century, ever since he steered his 14-Bis into the Paris sky in 1906, the country has been trying indefatigably to give their man his due, regardless of the academic consensus. Santos Dumont's mustachioed visage has graced Brazilian currency. One of Rio de Janeiro's airports is named after him. A replica of his airplane, piloted by a Santos Dumont look-alike, swooped through the Opening Ceremonies of the 2016 Rio Olympics. Now Santos Dumont truthers have found a new and powerful champion: Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In his third presidential term, amid a slew of foreign and domestic crises, Lula has repeatedly found time to trumpet Santos Dumont, and even take a few swipes at the Wright brothers. 'I can't even pronounce their name,' he scoffed in July. In comments to The Washington Post, the Brazilian president went further, delving into the minutiae of early 20th-century aerospace engineering and mourning what he described as the wrongful denial of Brazilian valor. 'Everyone knows that Santos Dumont was the first to make something heavier than air fly, in an autonomous way, without any assistance,' he vented. 'But the Americans have the movie industry and were able to promote the Wright brothers.' 'It's essential to restore aviation history and duly attribute Brazil's role,' Lula added. 'A nation needs to have values.' While in many ways a harmless kerfuffle, the dispute raises important questions about nationalism, the stories countries tell about themselves — and the limits of any universal truth. In other words, both sides are dug in. 'This is a very Brazilian thing,' said Peter Jakab, an emeritus curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. 'And in some ways, it's sad.' 'This is a typical American thing,' said Henrique Lins de Barros, a Brazilian physicist who has written three books on Santos Dumont. 'If it's not them, it can't be anyone.' So the question, again: Who invented the airplane? In the spring of 1900, Wilbur Wright set out to find a windy location to test his aviation theories. 'I'm afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man,' he wrote a colleague, soliciting suggestions for a 'suitable locality where I could depend on winds' to test his 'flying machine.' His search ultimately led him to Kitty Hawk, on the North Carolina coast. On its sand dunes 3½ years later, in winds that reached 27 mph, the Wright Flyer I rolled down a 60-foot rail and lifted off, carrying his brother Orville 120 feet. Three more flights were made that same day, the final one lasting nearly a full minute and traveling 852 feet. 'The airplane had been invented!' is how the National Air and Space Museum summarizes the moment. Not so fast, Brazilians counter. How can the world be sure that this flight was legitimate, that the Flyer would have lifted off without a boost from Mother Nature? 'That was a region that was rich in wind,' said Rodrigo Moura Visoni, a historian of Brazilian aviation. But the brothers weren't done. The next year, the Wrights' Flyer II pushed into the air in a field in Dayton, Ohio. And the year after that came the Flyer III. It achieved a flight that lasted for nearly 40 minutes and 24.2 miles — encouraging enough for the Wrights to propose the sale of the design to the U.S. government. Because the Flyer II struggled to reach the air without Kitty Hawk's strong gusts, and because the Ohio prairie afforded less open space for a runway, the brothers used a catapult when testing their next-generation flying machines so they could quickly reach the velocity needed to achieve liftoff. (Though a few brief wobbly flights, Wright historians note, were apparently achieved by the Flyer II without the catapult.) To Brazilians, the catapult should be disqualifying. 'They didn't take off on their own,' said Márcio Bhering Cardoso, the former director of the Brazil's national aerospace museum. 'They needed help.' Seconds Lula: 'The help of equipment and tracks.' Presented with these claims, Jakab, who has written or edited three books on the Wright brothers, could barely contain his exasperation. Brazil's 'argument,' he said, 'is so easily deconstructed it's not even really an argument.' He said it was 'preposterous' to claim that the Wright brothers' flights didn't count because of a catapult. Navy jets, he noted, still use a catapult system when lifting off from short runways on aircraft carriers — and no one says they're not real planes. Moreover, he said, the Flyer III sustained itself in the air for nearly 40 minutes. 'It's just patently ridiculous, on its surface,' Jakab said. 'They're just trying to negate everything the Wright brothers did before 1906.' That was the year Santos Dumont stepped out onto a field in Paris for a crucial test. The scion of a Brazilian coffee magnate had relocated to Europe, where he was famed for his debonair dress, fine dining habits — and aviation engineering. First came his affair with ballooning, and then the construction of his single-passenger airplane, the 14-Bis. On that day in November, before a gathering of judges and reporters, Santos Dumont climbed aboard his plane and sped down the field. As a headwind bore down, according to historian Lins de Barros, the plane lifted off, traveling 722 feet. 'It took off by itself,' Lula said. 'Without depending on external devices.' At first, since the Wright Brothers had been toiling in relative obscurity, French aviators heralded Santos Dumont's flight as the world's first. Now, much to Brazil's distress, the French and most of the world look differently upon that day. 'There is no doubt,' said Marion Weckerle, the aircraft collections manager at France's Air and Space Museum, 'that the Wright brothers flew before Santos Dumont.' On a recent overcast day in the mountainous town of Petrópolis, about 40 miles northeast of Rio, a tall man of regal bearing stepped up to the house Santos Dumont built atop a steep granite slope. As the aviator's closest living relative, Alberto Dodsworth Wanderley has spent much of his life steeped in the debate over who invented the airplane. He believes to his core that Santos Dumont deserves the credit, and has spent decades advocating that position. But now, at age 81, with his wife ill, he no longer thinks the argument matters all that much. 'What's the importance?' he wondered. 'Will this dispute bring us anywhere?' He walked through Santos Dumont's old home, now a museum. The inventor spent his final years here, horrified over the use of airplanes in war, before taking his own life in 1930. As Dodsworth Wanderley looked at the images of his great-uncle on the wall and the replicas of his inventions, word of his presence began to spread through the museum. Soon, people were crowding around him. They were shaking his hand. Touching his arm. Asking to take his picture. Someone whispered that he was a celebrity. His visit was front-page news in the local newspaper. 'It's an honor to know you,' one person told him. 'Your DNA is very important.' 'What a privilege,' said another. In this throng, there was no doubt who invented the airplane. But it was more an act of faith than a matter of fact. 'It's now an ideological problem,' Dodsworth Wanderley said. 'Pick your side and you'll find the arguments you need to stay there.' Marina Dias in Brasilia contributed to this story.
