Blue Planet Page #2

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is nighttime...

...watching lightning all over the Earth...

...as it goes from cloud top to cloud top...

...over hundreds of miles...

...almost like somebody

is conducting an orchestra, you know...

...and the lights flash

in response to the music and everything.

You float up in the window

and look for long periods of time...

...in amazement,

at what's going on down there.

In places where there is a lot of rainfall...

...an abundance of life springs forth.

The plants produce oxygen...

...which we and the other animals breathe.

Life on Earth is easy to see from space.

Costa Rica and Panama are green with it.

But other places in the world

get almost no rain.

In the Namib Desert,

only wind has shaped the surface...

...sweeping the parched sand

into dunes, nearly 1,000 feet high.

In some of the driest deserts...

...people have drilled for water

trapped in the rocks, deep below the sand.

Each one of these tiny circles

is an irrigated field...

...half a mile in diameter.

But this is a short-term gain.

It will take only 50 years

to use up all the water...

...but more than 10,000 years to replace it.

In some regions, like the Sahara...

...the amount of rainfall can change

drastically within a single generation.

When we started looking at Lake Chad

from space...

...we saw that it was shrinking.

Soon a wave of droughts...

...brought starvation

to the people living here.

We don't know why

these local changes occur...

...but we do know

that the Earth's climate, as a whole...

...has changed over much longer periods.

During the last million years...

...great sheets office

advanced and retreated several times...

...burying Northern Europe

and much of North America.

This is the Hubbard Glacier in Alaska.

Trapped deep inside these frozen walls...

...is a record of climate change...

...going back thousands of years.

By analyzing samples of the ancient ice...

...we may learn to predict

our future climate.

Ten thousand years from now...

...perhaps the sites of Montreal,

Detroit and Copenhagen...

...will again lie buried

beneath a mile office.

And it's moving. Looks good.

To observe large-scale changes

on the Earth...

...we use satellites.

The TDR satellite will act as a relay...

...linking scientists

with dozens of spacecraft...

...watching different parts of the globe.

Kathy, it looked like we had

a good deploy on time.

Everything looks good.

Some study ocean currents...

...others monitor the health of crops.

They also warn us when storms develop.

Of all the storms...

...the most dangerous

and unpredictable are hurricanes.

Without help from satellites...

...we could not prepare ourselves

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