THE GEOSPHERE IMAGE - 1990
“The idea of a Mother Earth isn't softheaded and mushy. It's a truth, or a view of truth. And to not know what our mother's face looks like seemed intolerable to me.” [1]
Described by the LA Times as “a pinpoint, diamond clear, electronic mosaic of the Earth and all its crannies,” the 4km GeoSphere Image was the first satellite picture of the Earth viewed from space, but without the clouds [2]. It measured 4,320 x 8,640 pixels at full resolution and was so detailed that, according to environmentalist Kenneth Brower, “338 television sets in twenty-six-stacks of thirteen would be required to show it” [3].
The Image was made by JPL engineer L. Van Warren and Van Sant using 4 Kilometer Very High-Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) weather data captured by the TIROS weather satellite and obtained from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The data was processed, colorized, and mosaicked using a Stardent GS1000 super-graphics computer. The final visualization, which contained over 37 million pixels, was released to the world on Earth Day 1990 and used shortly thereafter as the title page of the 1990 National Geographic World Atlas [4].
Van Sant gave the image rights to all US federal agencies and educational institutions. It was adopted by NOAA, NASA, and the United Nations, included with Silicon Graphics hardware to incentivize sales, mailed to all US schools, distributed by National Geographic Magazine, the Times of London, and Esri (Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc.),to name a few, and published in multiple books and magazines to become the world’s most reproduced image of its time.
Groundbreaking as it was, however, the Image was only Van Sant’s first step toward his GeoSphere Project vision. Almost as soon as it was completed, the Image was printed and mounted onto a large physical sphere, theGeoSphere Globe, which would sit at the heart of the Project’s Earth Situation Rooms.
TOM VAN SANT & L. VAN WARREN: THE GEOSPHERE IMAGE. DIGITAL MOSAIC, C. 1990
GEOSPHERE IMAGE DATA MAPPED ONTO A DIGITAL SPHERE, C. 1995
THE GEOSPHERE IMAGE PRINTED AND MAPPED ONTO A PHYSICAL SPHERE TO CREATE A GEOSPHERE GLOBE, C.1990
PUBLICATIONS THAT FEATURED THE GEOSPHERE IMAGE FILL BOOKCASE AT VAN SANT’S SANTA MONICA STUDIO, C. 1991
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Multiple locations.
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1990
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4 Kilometer AVHRR weather data captured by the TIROS weather satellite. Pixels.
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4,320 x 8,640 pixels at full resolution
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TVS funded the majority of the GeoSphere Project himself using the proceeds of selling his home. His figures suggest a cost of approximately $600,000 (around one and a half million dollars in 2024).
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TVS digital records
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In the late 1980s, L. Van Warren (“Van”), a young Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) engineer, was also planning to make a cloud-free, borderless, digital image of Earth as an backdrop for the visualization of global events. He was unaware of Van Sant’s project but when the keeper of NOAA’s satellite data told Van Sant about Van, the artist tracked the scientist down and proposed a collaboration. Fortunately for Van Sant, who had no digital expertise, computer graphics expert Van Warren agreed.
With JPL initially hosting the GeoSphere Project,and National Geographic providing $25,000 seed funding, Van Warren ordered five days of 4 km Advanced Very High-Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) data from NOAA and began compositing it on a SUN Workstation. As each of the AVHRR pixels held information about 4 km of the planet’s surface however, the SUN’s 4 megabytes of RAM soon proved unequal to the computational task. The pair needed a graphics supercomputer that could manipulate vast datasets. Van suggested the Stardent GS1000, which he’d seen demonstrated at SIGGRAPH the previous year, and Van Sant promptly spent much of his life savings on the purchase.
Creating the GeoSphere Image was an enormous task. Approximately 60% of the planet is covered in cloud at any one time and, instead of showing Earth’s natural colors, satellites document spectral wavelengths, five of which show up as red. With Photoshop unavailable in 1989, Van addressed these issues by developing a “paint to reveal” tool that could erase cloud from one image to reveal groundcover on a layer below. With JPL’s Jim Knighton he determined ocean color using an elevation database, and with JPL’s Leo Blume he streamlined the user interface so that artists Van Sant and new-recruit Erik Bruhweiler could use his custom color conversion program to “paint” Earth in its true colors and add in the rivers, which were invisible on 4km satellite images.
In fall 1989, when JPL’s Director insisted that JPL would own the completed GeoSphere Image, the pair quickly moved their operations from JPL to the backhouse of Van’s Pasadena home. Here, after ten months of intensive labor, the GeoSphere Image was finished in time for Earth Day, April 15, 1990.
[1] Jo Lauria, Oral history interview with Tom Van Sant, Smithsonian Archive of American Art, 2008
[2] Paul Dean, “Mapping The Real World,” Los Angeles Times, Jun 2, 1991, pg. N40
[3] Kenneth Brower, “New World View,” The Discovery Magazine, May 1992, p.19.
[4] Earth Day 1990 fell on April 15, which is also the birth date of Leonardo Da Vinci.
