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Visualized: an Earth-year through stunning NASA imagery (video)

Our planet had kind of a rough year in 2012, but thanks to its array of satellites and a certain floating lab, NASA documented every divine and terrifying moment from afar. On top of the usual beauty shots and time-lapses rendered by the ISS and true-color satellites, NASA also showed some spectacular data and modeling visualizations of atmospheric movement, storms and ocean salinity. That helps even the densest of us understand how hurricanes form, gulf streams flow and arctic ice breaks off and drifts seaward. But enough talk -- if a picture equals a thousand words, there are three million of them in the two minute video, after the break.