Big Picture: Earth Hour 2010

Beginning in Sydney, Australia three years ago, Earth Hour has grown into a global observance. States, large organizations and individual people observed Earth Hour 2010 on Saturday March 27th, as homes, office towers and landmarks turned off their lights for an hour starting at 8.30 pm local time to raise awareness about climate change and the threat from rising greenhouse gas emissions. Collected here are a series of before-and-after photographs from this year - which (starting with the second one below) will fade between "on" and "off" when clicked. [See also: last year] This effect requires javascript to be enabled. (26 photos total)

Click the image to see the collection, and be sure to click on each picture to see it fade to 'dark'.