NASA has released a video that provides a visualization of just how carbon dioxide emitted by humans travels around the world.

The simulation shows plumes of CO2 pouring into the atmosphere from sources in the United States, Europe, and East Asia, which then swirl around the world.

It took 75 days to create the simulation on a NASA supercomputer at Goddard Space Center in Maryland, according to National Geographic.

The model depicts CO2 emissions from May 2005 to June 2007 using mapping with 64 times the resolution of a standard climate model to dramatically illustrated how CO2 spreads across the globe.

The plumes come almost entirely from the Northern Hemisphere and eventually cover the entire hemisphere, including the Arctic region.

Fortunately, large amounts of the gas are absorbed by forests and other vegetation each season, and the model shows that as spring turns into summer, the plumes fade away as photosynthesizing plants gobble them up. Once the vegetation dies off in the winter, however, CO2 roars back into dominance.

It is estimated that about 36 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide get dumped into the atmosphere every year due largely to the burning of fossil fuels, with atmospheric concentrations of CO2 exceeding 400 parts per million in the spring of 2013 for the first time ever.

Scientists believe a level of 450 parts per million would cause dangerous disruptions in the climate.

To better observe this phenomenon, NASA launched the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite on July 2, which should begin to release data in early 2015.

Scientists will also study the effect that “carbon sinks” such as forests and oceans have on the climate, as they absorb up to 50 percent of CO2 released by humans.

The greenhouse effect refers to a process in which greenhouse gases like CO2 absorb thermal radiation from the Earth’s surface, locking that heat into the atmosphere and increasing the average surface temperature. Scientists warn that humanity’s release of CO2 is the cause for the rise, and that if it is not reversed, the Earth will experience rising sea levels that could eliminate cities, numerous animal species could become extinct, the frequency of famine will increase, and storms will become increasingly violent.