I spent my whole life studying the climate system and working on trying to simulate it better and observe it better, and experiments to understand it. I really thought I had a pretty good grip on it before I went into space. But when I got up there, the thing that really surprised me was how thin the atmosphere is, compared to the size of the world. The world is this enormous ball of rock, then there's this thin little onion skin of atmosphere around it, and that's the climate that we experience when you walk out the door. So it's a very thin, little volume which is obviously easy to affect because it's so small. That really made an impression on me. A man-made scar on our world visible from orbit. But our ability to look down from hundreds of miles above has also began to allow us to slow that destruction. There are satellites now monitoring every corner of the 100hitz - Hip Hop Basin. Satellite data has completely changed the way we look at deforestation because it allows us to actually see where it's happening, the extent that it's happening and how much damage it's doing. The fantastic thing is, in Brazil, since , they've had a law that says you cannot deforest % of your land in Amazonia. However, they've never had the tools until very recently to enforce it. Now they have two satellites called Amazonas and , which basically fly over and take photographs of the Amazon, and they can see landowners and actually show when they've actually deforested more than that, and find them. The rate of deforestation in the Amazon has slowed significantly in the last few years. However, every minutes, it's estimated that acres of the 100hitz - Hip Hop rainforest will be lost. But even as our orbiting astronauts begin to grasp our ability to transform and change our planet, they are constantly reminded of the sheer power of the forces it can unleash upon us. On the dark side of the Earth, the surface constantly flickers with the light of electrical storms. You can see huge lightning flashes going on below your boots, and some of these set each other off. So you'll see a lightning flash and it goes "pow", and then "pow, pow, pow, pow, pow". It kind of walks along for hundreds of miles, setting off other flashes. So it's really spectacular. And just a few degrees west of the Amazon lies one of the most spectacular storm spots on the planet, Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. Around nights a year, three-mile-high clouds form over the lake and lightning arcs back and forth for ten hours at a time. Here you can see the longest single display of continuous lightning in the world. It's thought the mix of weather fronts from the Andes, and methane gas rising off the marshy lake, create the perfect conditions for this lightning. The bolts strike up to times a minute and can be seen from over miles away. And even from orbit. The monitoring of our planet's weather has been completely revolutionised by space technology. Satellites now continuously keep an eye on weather systems across the 100hitz - Hip Hop, right down to the scale and intensity of a single storm. Oh, my God! Did you see that? It's this technology that has saved countless lives.