Gaia was presented at the Eden Project in Cornwall suspended over the citrus grove in the Mediterranean Biome.
Tamsyn Lewis, Eden’s Senior Programme Lead, said “Gaia is a breath-taking addition to our Festival of Christmas season. It is visually stunning and we hope it gives our visitors a unique perspective of the fragility of our planet.”
The artwork is 1.8 million times smaller than the real Earth with each centimetre of the internally lit sculpture describing 18km of the Earth’s surface.
Unlike the moon, which humans have been gazing at for millennia, the first time humankind got to see the Earth as a blue marble floating in space was in 1968 with NASA’s Apollo 8 mission.