05 Dec Google Timelapse – An animated look of Earth between 1984 and 2016
Google has released an update to the Timelapse feature of Google Earth, covering a few urban and natural locations of the globe. From rapidly expanding cities to shrinking lakes and glaciers, you’ll find stunning satellite images in these extremely interesting timelapses that present us a different way of observing the world.
The release notes from Google state:
Timelapse is a global, zoomable video that lets you see how the Earth has changed over the past 32 years. It is made from 33 cloud-free annual mosaics, one for each year from 1984 to 2016, which are made interactively explorable by Carnegie Mellon University CREATE Lab’s Time Machine library, a technology for creating and viewing zoomable and pannable timelapses over space and time.
Using Earth Engine, we combined over 5 million satellite images acquired over the past three decades by 5 different satellites. The majority of the images come from Landsat, a joint USGS/NASA Earth observation program that has observed the Earth since the 1970s. For 2015 and 2016, we combined Landsat 8 imagery with imagery from Sentinel-2A, part of the European Commission and European Space Agency’s Copernicus Earth observation program.
Hit play on some of the timelapses below, and don’t forget to zoom out a bit in the Amazon forest window:
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[vc_text_separator title=’Las Vegas’ title_align=’separator_align_center’ border=’no’ border_color=” background_color=” text_color=”]
[vc_text_separator title=’Dubai’ title_align=’separator_align_center’ border=’no’ border_color=” background_color=” text_color=”]
[vc_text_separator title=’Amazon deforestation in Brazil’ title_align=’separator_align_center’ border=’no’ border_color=” background_color=” text_color=”]
[vc_text_separator title=’Drying of the Aral sea’ title_align=’separator_align_center’ border=’no’ border_color=” background_color=” text_color=”]
[vc_text_separator title=’Dalian, China’ title_align=’separator_align_center’ border=’no’ border_color=” background_color=” text_color=”]
[vc_text_separator title=’Columbia Glacier Retreat’ title_align=’separator_align_center’ border=’no’ border_color=” background_color=” text_color=”]
Find more of these timelapses at earthengine.google.com/timelapse