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31 Days of Happiness Countdown: a NASA GIF to melt your stress away. (Day 19)

Thanks for stopping by for Day 19 of Upworthy's 31 Days of Happiness Countdown! If this is your first visit, here's the gist: Each day between Dec. 1 and Dec. 31, we're sharing stories we hope will bring joy, smiles, and laughter into our lives and yours. It's been a challenging year for a lot of us, so why not end it on a high note with a bit of happiness? Check back tomorrow (or click the links at the bottom) for another installment!

You've heard of the circle of life. (And now you're singing it. It's the ciiiiiiiircle of liiiiiife! You're welcome.)

But have you ever wondered what the circle of life actually looks like? Like ... from outer space?

Over the past two decades, scientists at NASA have been gathering satellite images of the Earth. They then took those images and compiled them into one giant, epic time-lapse.

It may not sound like much, but there's just something about watching it ebb and flow back and forth that evokes a deep sense of calm and contentedness. Breath in and out in time with it. It's the kind of immense relaxation that can help improve your sleep quality, lower your anger levels, and boost your confidence. I'm not saying this footage will turn your life around, but well, I'm not not saying it either.

In this short GIF of the NASA footage, compressed and sped up, you can watch the Earth "breathing." Check it out:

Innnnnnnn, and ouuuuuut. GIF via NASA.

Ice and frost drift toward the equator from the north and south poles, then gradually recede. Lush vegetation blooms in the spring months, then retreats again. Oceans move to and fro in stunning tidal patterns. Over and over and over again.

Watch it long enough and you start to feel extremely small and unimportant — in the best possible way. In a way that makes you feel free and like possibilities are endless. It's calming and reassuring ... in a cosmic sort of way.

(It sure beats checking Twitter for the hundredth time today.)

Check out the entire compilation from NASA, which includes higher quality footage and even more extraordinary views.

More days of happiness here: DAY 1 / DAY 2 / DAY 3 / DAY 4 / DAY 5/ DAY 6 / DAY 7 / DAY 8 / DAY 9 / DAY 10 / DAY 11 / DAY 12 / DAY 13 / DAY 14 / DAY 15 / DAY 16 / DAY 17 / DAY 18 / [DAY 19] / DAY 20 / DAY 21 / DAY 22 / DAY 23 / DAY 24 / DAY 25 / DAY 26 / DAY 27 / DAY 28 / DAY 29 / DAY 30 / DAY 31

Want to know what the North Pole is really like? We asked an Arctic researcher.

Photo by Vince Gx on Unsplash

A sunny day at the Saarland Glacier near the North Pole.

When Richard Krishfield began his career fixing office equipment, he had no idea it would take him to the ends of the Earth.

Then, in 1986, Krishfield, who had spent years working on computers and electronics for businesses, was asked down to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) in Massachusetts to work on one of their instruments — a conductivity, temperature, and depth (or CTD) device that collects data from its seat on the ocean floor.

It wasn't the work Krishfield was used to, but it offered an intriguing promise of adventure.

"I thought well, jeez, it might be kind of fun to work on ships and travel the world for a few years," Krishfield says over the phone. 35 years later, he's still doing it.

For over 85 years, the WHOI has been at the forefront of oceanographic study and innovation. Their scientists, engineers, and innovators routinely travel around the globe — from oil spill sites to exotic coastal shores to underwater volcanoes — collecting valuable data and learning how our world works.

Krishfield's work with the WHOI has brought him to some of the world's most extreme places, including the North Pole.

Unlike the iconic images of a massive, globe-spanning, elf-employing, gift-making, reindeer-housing operation run by a jolly man in a red suit, the real North Pole is home to navigators and researchers who brave some of the coldest weather on the planet in the name of science.

Living and working at the North Pole is an intense experience that takes a physical toll on those who venture out there.

Every year, Krishfield and his team spend months at a time camping out in the Arctic, setting up advanced observation instruments that send real-time data back to the WHOI. "Basically they’re sending back what you might consider the weather of the ocean," says Krishfield. And setting them up is no easy task.

"You’re living in a tent on the ice," says Krishfield. "And you don't have things like forklifts, so you have to muscle heavy equipment on and off small airplanes." Those airplanes land on makeshift runways that are cleared out by workers, too. In order for the ice to be thick enough to land a plane on, most of the work has to happen when it's as cold as possible.

"You have to get acclimated to the minus-20 or minus-30 degree temperatures and dress appropriately and know what to do," Krishfield says.

Over his 35-year career, Krishfield has seen firsthand just how much the Arctic is changing.

"Obviously the ice is melting," he says. "And in the 30 years I’ve been going up there, it's very clear how much."

One of the instruments Krishfield has helped set up is a buoy that sits on ice floes and dangles sensors into the water below to measure temperature, salinity, and current velocity of the ocean. When he first started installing them, he and his team would look for ice floes that were up to 4 meters thick.

"Then after a couple years we were looking for 2- to 3-meter floes," says Krishfield. "Then we were looking for 1-and-ahalf to 1-meter floes, and then this last summer, we were out there, and there was hardly any thick ice at all."

Greenland, research, global warming, Arctic, human footprint

Photo taken from a plane over the Jacobshavn Glacier Front in Ilulissat, Greenland

Image via U.S. Department of State/Wikimedia Commons.

Of course, Krishfield and the scientific community have been reporting shrinking ice in the Arctic for a long time. Studies confirmed long ago that the Arctic is warming, that the ice is melting, and just how catastrophic the result of that could be for the Earth's climate and ecosystems.

If the Arctic becomes a seasonal ice cap (where ice melts during the summer and refreezes during the winter), it could throw the planet's weather systems into utter chaos. Scientists estimate that could be the case by 2050.

"Probably sooner than that," says Krishfield.

You don't need to look at satellite data to see how much the Arctic has changed, Krishfield says.

"I look back and think of all the trips we used to do back in the summertime ... it was really beautiful out there," he recalls. "It’d be bright and sunny, and it was just beautiful."

"Now that the ice has melted away quite a bit, what you end up having is very grey, dull, dreary, and sort of foggy days out there. So the whole climate of it has changed."

It's hard to imagine that human beings could have any effect on the North Pole — as far away from it as we are — but we can and we do.

Arctic sea ice loss has been directly linked to carbon emissions, and saving the Arctic is a matter of cutting down those emissions quickly and dramatically. The North Pole is so extreme and so far away that we hardly ever think about it — let alone wrestle with the true global impact of what would happen if we let it melt. Odds are, the North Pole only comes up in conversation around Christmas — and not exactly in a "lets save the Arctic ice cap" context.

If you find hope in one thing though, consider the fact that human beings really can have an impact on the Arctic, for worse — or for better. Our actions have brought the Arctic Ocean to the brink, but it's the actions we take next, along with the hard work of scientists and researchers like Krishfield, that save it.

Heroes

These 5 bafflingly weird old maps of the Arctic show why it's worth preserving.

The North Pole was once one of the most inaccessible places on Earth.

Robert Peary's 1908 expedition to the Arctic. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Ships trying to sail anywhere near it risked getting permanently frozen in its vast, icy prison.

Fridtjof Nansen's ship, stuck in ice. Photo from Fridtjof Nansen/Wikimedia Commons.

Going on an expedition meant being at sea for at least a few months (maybe even years) and battling horrible cold, wind, snow, and ice, not to mention starvation. Not everyone who set out made it home again; whole expeditions sometimes just ... disappeared.

The crossing was so intense that humans actually reached the South Pole first. It really says a lot when Antarctica is the easier of your two options.

The first verified expedition to the North Pole didn't happen until 1926.

Though U.S. Navy engineer Robert Peary claimed to have made it to the pole in 1909, the first verified, undisputed claim to that achievement didn't happen until Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen flew over it in an airship in 1926.

Roald Amundsen. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Amundsen's team had also been the first to reach the South Pole, which I'm pretty sure means he owns the Earth now.

Before Mr. Roald "Fur Coat" Amundsen, however, mapmakers had been trying to guess what the Arctic looked like for centuries.

See the stone thing in the center and the four islands surrounding the North Pole in this map from 1595?

The red, green, and yellow blobs around the edges are Canada, Europe, and Asia, respectively. The blobs in the middle are ... Mordor? Image from Gerardus Mercator/Wikimedia Commons.

Those are there because mapmaker Gerardus Mercator seemed to think there might be some sort of lost world up there.

By the late 1600s, mapmakers had a better idea of what the pole looked like, but Greenland and Canada still seemed to cause some conundrums.

1680 map by Moses Pitt. Original image from Moses Pitt/Toronto Public Library/Wikimedia Commons.

Like, I'm pretty sure Greenland and Canada don't actually connect to each other.

Original image from Moses Pitt/Wikimedia Commons.

And this mapmaker in 1720 seems to have admitted ignorance, shrugged his shoulders, and just stopped drawing.

C. G. Zorgdrager's 1720 map of the North Pole. Original image from National Library of Norway/Wikimedia Commons.

Some maps, like this one from 1762, made some ... interesting guesses at what the North Pole looks like.

Jean Javier's 1762 map of North America. Image from Jean Lattre/Wikimedia Commons

Interesting guesses like "Maybe future-Alaska isn't a thing."

Image from Jean Lattre/Wikimedia Commons.

And "What if I put a big ol' sea here in the middle of what will one day be Seattle and British Columbia?"

I'm pretty sure I'd remember if Seattle were in the middle of a giant bay. Image from Jean Lattre/Wikimedia Commons.

Even years later, in 1776, Alaska was still proving troublesome to mapmakers.

1776 map. Image from Zatta/Wikimedia Commons.

I mean REALLY.

?!?!?!!!!! Image from Zatta/Wikimedia Commons.

By the 1880s, at least, we knew more or less what was at the North Pole (nothing but water and ice).

Although this map still has a few blank places at the very top of Greenland and Canada.

Those Aleutian Islands look a little short, too. An 1882 map. Image from the New York Public Library.

Good job, 1880s.

Thanks to those explorers and technology, we now know that the Arctic looks like this:

Image from Uwe Dedering/Wikimedia Commons.

But — would those explorers of a century ago, the ones who spent months and years traversing its icy waters, even recognize the place if they saw it today?

In a recent interview, oceanographer Peter Wadhams told The Independent that the Arctic may be on track to be ice-free for the first time in 100,000 years.

Climate change has been consistently reducing the sea ice around the Arctic Ocean for decades, to the extent that the same passages and channels that once baffled and trapped early explorers are now so ice-free that they're being considered for use as shipping lanes.

In late 2015, the Russian icebreaker Vaygach completed a trip along the north coast of Siberia in just seven and a half days. Image from Dudinka_Apu/Wikimedia Commons.

Our maps may be a lot better now, but that doesn't mean we should abandon the Arctic's air of mystery and adventure.

After all, it's still home to seals that look like something out of a Tim Burton film...

Yup, that's definitely the seal version of Beetlejuice. Image from Michael Cameron/Wikimedia Commons.

...not to mention weird methane that seeps from deep in the seabed and these fire-breathing lakes. So even though we now know where we're going when it comes to the North Pole, there's still plenty up there left to discover.

Last year, 174 countries pledged to help fight climate change at the COP21 climate change conference in Paris. Individual people can help, too, by reducing their energy consumption and not only voting for politicians who don't think climate change is a hoax, but making sure they stick to their agreements after they're in office.

If we can accomplish that, we can keep the Arctic cold — and help preserve for future generations the air of mystery and adventure that those old (admittedly faulty) maps embody.

Heroes

The incredibly weird reason the North Pole is headed to England.

You know the North Pole?

Image from Christopher Michel/Flickr.

Yeah, that North Pole. It turns out — it's not the North Pole anymore. It, uh ... moved.

The Geographic North Pole is the point around which the rest of the Earth spins. Kind of like this:

GIF from "Elf."

(We also have a Magnetic North Pole, which is what compasses point to. Yes, we have two North Poles. And yes, they're in different spots. I know, I'm sorry).

NASA's been using satellites to watch our poles for a long time, and it turns out the Geographic Pole is not where it used to be.

Technically, yes, the North Pole has always been moving slightly.

The Earth spins around an invisible axis that runs between its North and South Poles, but it's not perfect.

Like a slightly imbalanced top, the Earth wobbles a bit.

Wobble wobble wobble wobble. GIF from "Inception."

According to NASA, historically, the North Pole had been heading slowly but steadily toward North America. Hudson Bay, in particular.

Recently, the North Pole did something really weird though: It kind of ... turned around.

"This is why nobody likes driving with you, Dave."

Before, this is what the trajectory of the North Pole looked like:

Image from NASA/JPL-Caltech.

For a long time, it was slowly but steadily moving down toward Canada.

But around the year 2000, something happened — the axis started booking it away from North America. Fast.

Image from NASA/JPL-Caltech.

It wasn't the Y2K bug — so what changed around the new millennium that shifted the direction of the North Pole?

It all has to do with water weight — specifically, where on Earth we keep our water.

Like a spinning top, if one side of the Earth is heavier than the other, it affects how it spins. But if you stop the top and redistribute the weight, the wobble will change, too.

Image from NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Water is remarkably heavy. And according to NASA, a one-two hit of melting ice sheets coupled with a drought in Asia is redistributing the Earth's water weight. The drought aspect is especially powerful because it's positioned perfectly to really mess with the Earth's rotation.

So where is the North Pole headed next? Looks like Merry Old England.

Image from Milenqqa/Pixabay.

It's moving there at a glacially-slow-to-us-but-kind-of-fast-for-the-planet seven inches per year, says NASA. Though when it gets to England, it'll have to convert that to centimeters, obviously.

There's no need to panic.

This isn't dangerous and won't affect our daily lives. We're not going to be redrawing any maps anytime soon.

GIF from "Potter Puppet Pals."

NASA and other agencies will need to keep track of it in order to keep satellites and GPS accurate, but that's about all the practical changes we'll need to make.

But it does show how little changes can affect things much, much larger. Like, planet-sized things.

As ice sheets melt and weather patterns get more extreme, we're likely to see more of these secondary, larger changes happen to our planet. So buckle up — things might be about to get weird.

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Heroes

If you're 30, see what the Arctic ice cap was doing when you went to high school.

If you're 30 years old, you've seen a good amount of change in your lifetime. Over the years you've gone from child to teenager to real adult. You've worked your way through the trials and tribulations of first steps, first crushes, and first jobs. You went to school, got jobs, and grew up. It's the start of an immense and grand story.

But you're not the only thing changing in this story. As you've grown, the background has changed too. Sometimes it's obvious — like moving to a new house or a new city.

But is it possible that larger things changed too?

If you're 30, you started the first grade around 1991 or so.

Back when this was the greatest place on Earth. Image from Matthew Paul Argall/Flickr.

Let's go way back — the first real day of school. New teachers, new kids. Homework, for the first time ever. I remember someone informing me that there were 11 more grades to go and being baffled that anything could possibly take that long!

Meanwhile, the world spun on. Plants grew and died with the seasons, storms came and and went, and up in the Arctic, the ice grew and shifted, as always.

1991. All GIFs from NOAA Climate.gov/YouTube.

You were a high school freshman in 1999, or so.

Eight years later, you were probably starting high school. You weren't the hyperactive kid anymore; you were more stable. More collected. More cool (maybe).

Meanwhile, exciting things were happening in the world. "Star Wars: Episode I," "The Matrix," and "Family Guy" all premiered that year. People were Y2K-proofing their computers. And everyone was drawing that weird S-thing on their notebooks.

1999.

And the Arctic still went through its annual cycle of freeze and thaw.

This is an animation created by the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration, by the way. The colors in the GIFs show how old the ice is: The whiter the ice is, the older it is.

And ice, like people, tends to get stronger and more resilient as it matures. It's more likely to stick around through tough times. At first there seemed to be a lot of old ice. But something's changing...

If you went to college, you were probably the class of 2007.

Bob Barker bids farewell to "The Price Is Right," but Don Draper steps into the zeitgeist as the wildly-popular "Mad Men" premieres. The final "Harry Potter" book comes out.

As for you, this was a year of caps and gowns and new jobs. By now you were into your 20s — officially an adult — someone with real responsibility and experience. Someone who things can start to count on to stick around.

2007.

But the same can't be said for the North Pole.

Did you spot the pattern? Look close - the white part's starting to disappear. The old ice is going away.

And if you have kids, they might have been born in either 2011 or 2012, statistically speaking.

2011-2012.

But by then the old ice had practically disappeared.

That means the entire ice pack is weaker, more fragile, and more likely to melt in the summer. In 2012, for example, the summer extent of the ice was only about half the 1979-2000 average.

It's as if someone took a population of strong, resilient adults and replaced them with first graders.

What will the world be like by the time the next generation turns 30?

By the time the kids born in 2011 turn 30, the Arctic could be largely ice-free during the summer.

This could have huge implications for the planet. Melting sea ice could change weather patterns thousands of miles away. Ocean currents could change too. And all the people and animals — like polar bears — who depend on the ice would be in serious trouble.

But we can still do something about the underlying cause. By using less fossil fuel and investing in green energy, we can help slow down climate change and, hopefully, help retain as much of that mature ice as we can.

And it starts with us knowing what's going on in the great white north. Let's spread the word.

Watch the full animation below:

It's mesmerizing.

Video from NOAA Climate.gov/YouTube.

Heroes

Russia is breaking records at the North Pole. America is being left in the cold.

Fasten your seat belts and, uh, put on your snow jackets. A new world speed record has been set.

That's because on Christmas Day 2015, the Russian icebreaker Vaygach completed a journey along the north coast of Siberia — a trip known as the Northern Sea Route — in just seven and a half days.

Which, for a boat that looks like this:

Image from Dudinka_Apu/Wikimedia Commons.

is like:

Vaygach left the Bering Strait, near Alaska, on Dec. 17, and covered over 2,200 nautical miles to get to the White Sea, just off the north coast of Finland, by Dec. 25. It ended up coming in about a half-day faster than previous trips.

One reason they went so fast might be that there wasn't as much ice.

"Climate change means Arctic sea ice is vanishing faster than ever," said President Obama in a speech at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy Commencement in May 2015. It's true. In fact, 2015's maximum ice was the lowest on record. (This winter's numbers aren't in yet because, well, winter's not over yet.)

"By the middle of this century," Obama continued, "Arctic summers could be essentially ice free. We’re witnessing the birth of a new ocean — new sea lanes, more shipping, more exploration, more competition for the vast natural resources below."

Less ice will likely mean more traffic throughout the Arctic.

Even if the ice is still pretty thick in places, more and more ships are making the trip along both the northern coast of Siberia and through the Northwest Passage that stretches from Alaska to Greenland.

Image from NASA/Wikimedia Commons.

"From the 1980s on, voyages through the Passage have become an annual event," said a report by Canada's Northwest Territories' Department of Environment and Natural Resources, "The number of transits increased from 4 per year in the 1980s to 20-30 per year in 2009-2013."

But if the U.S. wants to be able to patrol this new ocean, we're woefully unprepared.

Not every ship can plow through the arctic ice — you have to have specially designed icebreakers like the Russian Vaygach or the Coast Guard's USCGC Healy.

America currently has two fully functional icebreakers. Just two. Russia, on the other hand, has 40. And they're building more. China also is becoming increasingly involved in Arctic expeditions.

I bet they have no trouble at parties. GIF via Patrick Kelley/YouTube.

Alaskan Senator Dan Sullivan said, "The highways of the Arctic are paved by icebreakers. Right now, the Russians have superhighways, and we have dirt roads with potholes.”

Obama has since called on the U.S. to build more icebreaker ships, but it's not set just yet.

U.S. military operations on Arctic land could face trouble for melting ice too.

A report from the Government Accountability Office found that coastal military sites are in danger from climate change. In Alaska, for example, coastal erosion from thawing permafrost and rising sea levels is putting Air Force radar and communications stations in danger. Roads, sea walls, and runways have also been damaged.

When permafrost thaws, anything built on top of it is just kind of out of luck. Image from USGS/Flickr.

Climate change will challenge the military's entire mission.

Increasingly unstable weather could mean more humanitarian missions both abroad and at home — think about all the work the Coast Guard had to do during Hurricane Sandy.

Plus, climate change could fuel more competition for scarce resources like food and water, which could lead to more global instability, more extremism, and more refugees. Some reports have pointed out that severe drought and crop failures helped fuel early unrest in Syria, for example.

This isn't partisan rhetoric — this is coming directly from the Department of Defense.

“The Department of Defense's primary responsibility is to protect national security interests around the world," said officials in a July 2015 release. "The department must consider the effects of climate change — such as sea level rise, shifting climate zones and more frequent and intense severe weather events — and how these effects could impact national security.”

So it's a little frustrating to hear Congress prevaricate about it. I mean, some senators are still treating climate change like some sort of conspiracy theory. If the military has already accepted it as fact, why can't the rest of the government?

Heroes

Today's temperatures at the North Pole are scaring scientists around the world.

The North Pole is famous for many things. 24-hour darkness, polar bears, and of course, being the home of Santa Claus.

One thing it's definitely not known for, though, is balmy, casual, "Hey, how cold is it? Do you think I need a light jacket?" type temperatures.

The north pole is freezing. It's one of the coldest places on Earth. In fact, it's sometimes colder than Mars. Mars!

The frozen ice-ball where Matt Damon lives. Photo by NASA/Getty Images.

But according to scientists, a storm the likes of which few have ever seen is about to raise north pole temperatures to as high as 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

That's about 50 degrees warmer than usual and is, according to meteorologist Eric Holthaus, "absolutely terrifying."

It's always comforting when a scientist uses the words "absolutely terrifying."

The biggest reason behind that terror? Water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. But if it gets warmer than that, ice melts. If the North Pole (which is covered in sea ice) begins to melt, less sunlight can be reflected off the ice. Thus, arctic temperatures rise even faster in a vicious cycle.

Also, if the continental ice sheets in that region start to melt, sea levels everywhere could quickly rise to dangerous levels.

Rising sea levels have already started to affect areas like Robbins, Maryland. Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

The storm is on its way to becoming one of the strongest in the North Atlantic's history.

It's a "meteorological marvel" that has so far ripped through Texas in the form of brutal tornados, dumped record amounts of rain onto the Midwest, and is now moving on with the intention of flooding an already soaked U.K. ... and bringing hoodie weather to one of the coldest places on the planet.

It rained so much in London this year that everyone was required to buy cool umbrellas. Photo by Ben Pruchnie/Getty Images.

Hurricane-force winds and alarmingly low barometric pressure are pushing it into the category of "bombogenesis..." a term used to describe "meteorological bombs" that often devastate large areas.

One piece of good news, though: The 230-mile-per-hour jet stream that the storm caused in the North Atlantic actually shortened flights from New York to London to a little over five hours. (It usually takes six or seven.)

"This, more than any other extreme weather event in a remarkable year for the climate, feels like something new," writes climate blogger Robert Scribbler.

And it has been a remarkable year for the climate. The east coast just had its warmest Christmas ever. Manhattan was over 70 degrees at noontime, and in Queens, people were surfing. Yeah. Surfing.

Surfers flocked to Rockaway Beach this Christmas because the waves were "totally tubular" or whatever they say. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

So what in the lukewarm world is going on here?

Well, as you can probably imagine, climate change is playing a big part.

According to many climate scientists, including Michael E. Mann of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, regular El Nino ocean temperature fluctuations are being made worse by human-caused climate change.

All of which is causing worse storms than usual.

Robert Scribbler writes that the strong winds and tropical air associated with the storm system "reeks of human-forced warming of the Earth's climate."

And although some remain skeptical of the correlation in this case, it's hard to imagine a situation where record-breaking-ly warm air being hurled at the North Pole is a good thing.

The only positive outcome I can imagine is that Santa, who obviously spends his downtime hang gliding and reading mystery novels in Bermuda, might not have to go anywhere else this year. He could probably just have a barbecue in his backyard with all his reindeer.