Visualizing How We Reached 7 Billion

This morning NPR had a story about the world's population reaching 7 billion. Then this afternoon Ronald Ho posted a link to the following visual explanation of how the population reached grew so fast over the last two hundred years. Watch the visualization below.



National Geographic has been running a year-long series of stories about the population reaching 7 billion. You can find all of those resources here.

Applications for Education
Some questions for students to ponder as they watch the visualization: why did the population increase so rapidly? What problems for the environment will the growing population cause? What problems could competition for resources cause?