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North and South: Opposite Seasons

Animation showing monthly changes on the Earth's surface over a complete year.
Click on image for full size (1.8 MB Kb)
NASA's Earth Observatory
NASA's Earth Observatory has recently started making images of the entire surface of the Earth every month. There are no clouds in the images because they combine many pictures taken at different times when the weather is clear in different places. The polar ice caps look larger than they really are because of how the globe was projected onto a rectangle.

The animation begins in January, when it is winter in the North and summer in the South. As the months go by, you can see the ice and snow melt in the North and then return the following winter.

There is not as much land far in the South, so the change in the snow is less obvious. But you can see the land in the South grow more green in the summer (when it is winter in the North) and more brown in the winter (when it is summer in the North).

For the first time, you can see with your own eyes how the seasons are opposite in the North and South.


More animations of the Earth from Space


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Page created October 30, 2006 by Travis Metcalfe.
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