Gaia was presented at the Eden Project in Cornwall suspended over the citrus grove in the Mediterranean Biome. It measures seven metres in diameter and is created from detailed NASA imagery of the Earth’s surface. The artwork is presented with a surround sound composition by Dan Jones.

It is designed to show the Earth as it would be viewed from space, demonstrating the beauty and fragility of our home planet and communicating the urgent need to look
after it.

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.