Screen Saver Shows Effects of Global Warming Arid Ocean, has announced the launch of The Living Globe, an animated earth screen saver that lets users see the effects of global warming in real time. Users can also interactively change the global sea level and see how inhabited areas would be affected. Arid Ocean is a small company dedicated to real time 3D simulations of various aspects of the environment. “The political and scientific debate about the effects of global warming gave us the idea to let the user vary the level of the oceans in our screen saver and see what would happen to coastal regions all over the world”, says Michael Schmeling, owner and founder of Arid Ocean. “While current forecasts for the sea level rise caused by global warming predict an increase between 18 cm and 59 cm, Living Globe allows levels between 250m below and 250m above normal. This is similar to large scale climate changes as they occurred through geologic times, where land areas could either become submerged under water or ocean floors to become dry land.”
In addition to being able to interactively change the global sea level, users can also see the variation in snow and ice coverage throughout the seasons and view nightly city lights on the dark side of the earth. A world population clock shows the population of different regions changing every second.
The earth animation uses high resolution images from NASA to display a detailed illuminated surface relief of the earth. The lighting is calculated according to the time of day and seasons. Also courtesy of NASA are images of the growing and shrinking polar ice caps. Sun and moon positions are correctly calculated and the sky view displays the real positions of more than one-million stars from NASA's Tycho star catalog.
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