Every Nuclear Bomb Detonation from 1945 to 1998

The following animation by the artist Isao Hashimoto depicts every nuclear bomb explosion from 1945 to 1998. It’s on the long side, but that's what makes so unsettling (and effective).

The hums of the detonations give the piece a surreal, musical texture, but it’s the metronomic beeping—and the silence between those beeps—that lets the gravity set in. We do quite a lot of damage in the name of protecting ourselves from each other.