NASA releases Earth Day 'Global Selfie' mosaic

For Earth Day this year, NASA invited people from all over to take a "selfie" and share it with the world on social media.

NASA collected these selfies and used them to create a 2.3 billion-pixel sized Earth Day "Global Selfie" photo mosaic.

The Global Selfie mosaic was built using over 36,000 individual selfies drawn from more than 50,000 images tagged #GlobalSelfie that were posted on or around Earth Day, April 22, on Twitter, Facebook, Google and Flickr.

The selfies were posted by people on every continent and 113 countries and regions, from Antarctica to Guatemala. The resulting mosaic is a zoomable 3.2-gigapixel image that viewers can explore to look at each individual photo.

"With the Global Selfie, NASA used crowd-sourced digital imagery to illustrate a different aspect of Earth than has been measured from satellites for decades: a mosaic of faces from around the globe," said Peg Luce, deputy director of the Earth Science Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The project was designed to increase environmental awareness and knowledge of the agency's work to protect our home planet.

"We were overwhelmed to see people participate from so many countries," she said. "We're very grateful that people took the time to celebrate our home planet together, and we look forward to everyone doing their part to be good stewards of our precious Earth."