Look at how thin our atmosphere is

"Look at how thin our atmosphere is. This is all there is between humankind and deadly space."

-- Astronaut Alexander Gerst

A Thin Blue Layer ● "Thin Blue Layer" protecting the home planet ● Thin Blue @Pinterest

○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Environmental Security & The Thin Blue Layer

New Definitions of National Security: Environmental Security

"Thin Blue", a Global Trust, Earth's Atmosphere

Astro Wiseman's point of view

Astro Gerst's point of view

A Moment of Thanks for Earth’s Atmosphere / On Thanksgiving, November 2014

GP360: "Look, a twelve-minute drive"... to the top of the troposphere...

Astronauts often comment on the thinness of the Earth’s life-supporting envelope, and how it suggests the fragility of our planetary ecosystem. They also note that the number of atmospheric layers they can detect with their eyes is much greater than what their photographs show.

○

Images revealing atmospheric 'height', a 'shallow troposphere', a narrow band of life-giving atmosphere surrounding Earth

http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/ISS_setting_moon.jpg

http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/File:Earths_Atmospheric_Layers.JPG

○

Overview

One of the earliest known implications of space travel noticed by returned astronauts is what author Frank White has called the “Overview Effect.”

“For the first time in my life, I saw the horizon as a curved line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light: the atmosphere,” said Ulf Merbold, a German astronaut who flew on Space Shuttle Columbia in 1983. “This was not the ‘ocean’ of air I had been told it was ... I was terrified by its fragile appearance.”

Frank White has made the overview effect a life philosophy. He’s helped found the Overview Institute, an organization dedicated to immersive space-related art and media that will allow the rest of us Earth-bound landlubbers to experience the transcendent insights that, until now, has been possibly only by space travel ...

○

Earthviews from Astronauts

Astronaut Gerst: Some things that on Earth we see in the news every day and thus almost tend to accept as a “given”, appear very different from our perspective. We do not see any borders from space. We just see a unique planet with a thin, fragile atmosphere, suspended in a vast and hostile darkness. From up here it is crystal clear that on Earth we are one humanity.

○

Atmosphere of Earth - Wiki Isn't It About Time? ... We are in the first era of geo-monitoring the thin blue atmosphere, earth systems and biosphere from space ... [1] [2]

Beginning with first-ever images of our home planet, Earth, taken from the Apollo era ... [3] [4]

Now follows #Earth360 continuing first-generation data and #sustainability realizations

An #EarthPOV, an "Overview" that, over time, will educate and open us to new challenges

Our generation welcomes new possibilities as citizens of the planet ...

○

Steven Schmidt / GreenPolicy Siterunner: Even as we consider the new data and science made available and possible from Earth Observations from space with a first-generation of satellite capabilities, we realize the consequential and existential experiment humanity is conducting in the atmosphere of the planet. We are an anthropocene era where human impacts on the environment are multiplying globally and, in the case of the planet's atmosphere, producing effects yet to be understood. It is a grand experiment in effect taking place above and around us. The profound implications of human-caused impacts can not and should not be understated.

○

Elon Musk / 2015: "The greater the change to the chemical composition of the physical, chemical makeup of the oceans and atmosphere [due to increased carbon emissions], the greater the long-term effect will be."

"Given that at some point they'll run out anyway, why run this crazy experiment to see how bad it'll be? We know it's at least some bad, and the overwhelming scientific consensus is that it'll be really bad."

○

A "paper thin" layer absorbing the sum of human-produced hydrocarbon & emission "externalities"

File:Above Earth, 27.4 degrees south lat, 110.1 degrees west long.jpg

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Tags: #BlueMarble; #Earth360; #EarthPOV; #OverviewEffect; #Troposphere; #ThinBlueLayer

◊