GIF Made with Electron Microscope Zooms In On Life, On Life, On Life

Screen Shot 2014-05-29 at 4.54.33 PM

No, the title of this post wasn’t written by some sort of broken record robot. It is in fact an accurate description of the GIF below, which was created from photographs taken with a Scanning Electron Microscope.

As the incredibly powerful microscope zooms in, it goes from showing an amphipod (a type of shell-less crustacean), to a diatom (a type of algae) that’s on the amphipod, to a microscopic bacterium that’s on the diatom that’s on the amphipod. It’s life, on life, on life:

cTSHZGH

The GIF was created by James Tyrwhitt-Drake back in 2012, when he captured the images at the University of Victoria’s Advanced Microscopy Facility and posted the final product to his Tumblog, Infinity Imagined.

Granted, it’s no GIF of a Vine of a Video of a Flipbook of a GIF of a Video of a Roller Coaster… it’s better. That was just an experiment in Meta, this is a photographically and scientifically fascinating learning experience.

But just in case you absolutely need more of an Inception feel, we’ll leave you with the words of Redditor adamwong246, who described the GIF as follows, “There’s a bacterium on a diatom on an amphipod on a frog on a bump on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea!”

(via Smithsonian via Beautiful/Decay)

Discussion