A glance at the dance between the snow and the plants.
Here’s another version that combines the view from the north pole seen above with two other viewpoints.
John Nelson combined a series of monthly pictures of the earth provided by NASA’s Visible Earth project to create these gifs of the seasonal ebb and flow of snow and vegetation. He writes about how and why he created the gifs and provides links to larger versions on his UXBlog
The gif takes about 1.6 seconds to cycle through the 12 months of the year which means that if you find the gifs mesmerizing and you get lost staring at them for about 2 minutes and 8 seconds, you watched 80 years of your life go by as the seasons changed and changed again.
If the speed is a bit too fast, here’s a place where you can control the rate of change. Click and hold on the center of the image and, with the left mouse button held down, move the mouse back and forth to change the seasons.