Animated Google Doodle Celebrates Earth Day 2011

Today is Earth Day, an annual event which takes place on the 22^nd April and to celebrate Google has replaced their logo with a brand new animated Google Doodle. At first glance the image appears to be static but if you take the time to explore a little deeper you will see that there is actually a lot going on.

For starters the river is animated, this requires no interaction from the user as it runs through the middle of the landscape. However mouse over the frog and it will hop into the river, mouse over the river and a salmon will rise and leaps up the waterfall (watch closely to see what happens to it), the lion growls, a panda jumps after it’s offspring sneezes, birds fly etc. We’ll leave the rest up to you to discover.

If you click on the Doodle it navigates to the search results page for ‘Earth Day’ with the top result being Wikipedia and the second the official earth day website. Their aim is to encourage a ‘billion acts of green’ through environmental education and encouraging people to pledge a green act. As it stands the earth day website is showing 102,012,078 ‘acts of green’ ranging from recycling more bottles to growing their own vegetables and sharing them.

In the past Google has used Doodles to celebrate famous people of the past and to raise awareness of worthy and popular causes. It seems that Earth Day is one of the worthiest causes of them all, we do all live on planet Earth and raising awareness of how we can help make things better can only be a good thing.

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What do you make of the Google Doodle and which is your favourite part?