I would approach this with splines and sweep nurbs and place them manually around the globe because the atom array is extremely limited and its hard to work with transparent materials. You can animate the sweep nurbs manually or if you have any expresso experience you can set everything up with an itinerations.
Here is a file that I made a while back that gives a similar expresso set up.
http://www.randyarchy.com/grow.c4d.zip
/Randy