This graphic depicts ice thickness as it approached the annual maximum in January and February this year:

Credits: CPOM/UCL/ESA

ESA has also a released a preliminary, low resolution, exagerrated terrain profile of the ice sheet in Antartctica. Data is from February and March 2011:

CPOM/UCL/ESA/Planetary Visions

According to ESA this new information will provide a baseline for further measurements, shedding new light on the complex relationship between polar ice and climate.

Also See – What would Greenland look like without the ice cap.

A background article in the Washington Post paints a pretty negative picture of the changes shown:

…as life expectancies vary across the country, both men and women in certain counties, particularly in the South and Southeast, can expect to die more than a decade sooner than others.

and…

the country as a whole is falling behind other industrialized nations in the march toward longer life.

Starting on June 5,  the following image sequence, based on data from Meteosat-9, MTSAT-1R and GOES-11 satellites maps the spread of the ash cloud around the southern hemisphere. Bright red indicates the highest ash concentrations.

Credit: Darwin VAAC. Source agencies NOAA, JMA and EUMETSAT

The Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre has an animated version of the sequence.

You can’t do anything rather than rotate the globe, select and deselect airlines – several hundred by my reckoning – but it’s still pretty cool.

As with Google’s recently launched Search Globe, the clever thing about this is it runs natively in the browser without the need for Flash. You’ll need a WebGL capable Internet browser – latest version of Chrome, Firefox etc – not Internet Explorer.

If you can’t get the website working – a few of the comments suggest incompatibility issues with various versions of Windows – check out the video instead:

No real surprise to see Facebook continuing to spread. chalking up a bunch of Middle East countries such as Syria, Iraq and Iran since the December 2010 graphic. The site is now the market leader in 119 out of the 134 countries shown. Vincent predicts Brazil and the Netherlands will be next to fall.

Here’s the full sequence of maps dating back to June 2009:

Interestingly, although globally Facebook continues to grow strongly, some recent reports claim monthly active user numbers have dropped back slightly in the USA,  Canada and the UK.

Green indicates healthy forest and grassland; Red, burnt areas; bright pink, ongoing fires.

Click here if you don’t see the images.

Courtesy NOAA

Ron Gabriel’s 3-way street highlights the bad habits of New York motorists, cyclists and jaywalking pedestrians, focusing on the way such behaviour was exacerbated by the roll-out of bike lanes across the city.

The video analyzes a series of dangerous looking near-misses at the intersection of Park Avenue South and 28 Street. Footage is annotated, with graphics drawn around vehicles and pedestrians so you can track events leading up to each incident.

3-Way Street is part of a larger road safety awareness campaign. For more info, see blog.ronconcocacola.com.

via

The SDO records 1 terrabyte of imagery showing changes on the Sun’s surface every day. To make it accessible to the wider public, NASA and the European Space agency have put together Helioviewer – a simple to use, online application which lets you lets you browse current and archived images from the SDO and the older SoHO spacecraft.

Just like Google maps you can pan around and zoom-in for detailled close-ups. For instance here’s a link to imagery of the June 7 prominence. Through the drop down menus you can switch the visualization to different wavelengths of light, even blend several different layers together.

Just recently new features were added to make it possible to view image sequences as high-definition time-lapse movies and upload these to Youtube. I used it to create the video above,  switching the time and date to 07:30 on June 7 2011,   then selected the ‘Movie’ -> ‘Viewport’ option to pick an area to capture.

By default, movie duration is 3 hours but you can alter it to cover a longer period. Takes a few minutes for the application to  prepare the videos – even longer when lots of people are trying to use it,   but the results are pretty incredible.

Newly released data from the British Office of National Statistics shows huge variations in life expectancy across the UK. The Guardian has pushed the figures into four maps, two for each gender – life expectancy and another indicating the change from the period 2001-3 to 2007-9

With the sole exception of males living in Orkney, these reveal increasing life expectancies everywhere, but widening regional variations. Rising from 9.8 to 11.3 years for males, 8.2 to 10.1 years for females

The most striking geographical differences occur in male life expectancy (pictured top right): Scotland fairs worse than England. Apart from a handful of wealthy districts in London and the south, rural areas outperform cities.

In a set of maps described in NASA’s news release as ‘groundbreaking’, scientists working at the Goddard flight center have depicted this activity for land vegetation around the globe for the very first time.  The data was collected with the spectrometer on the Japanese Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT).

Two maps show the striking difference between fluorescence in the winter and summer seasons in Northern and Southern hemispheres.

Apparently previous maps showing plant ‘greenness’ suffer from a significant time lag between changes on the ground occurring and what satellites can detect. Measuring plant fluorescence offers much more immediate insight into things like environmental stress.

How could this data be used ?

They could help farmers respond to extreme weather or make it easier for aid workers to detect and respond to famines. Fluorescence could also lead to breakthroughs in scientists’ understanding of how carbon cycles through ecosystems – — one of the key areas of uncertainty in climate science.

Read more at NASA.

Also See: The Green Planet