Watch the Earth Change before Your Eyes

Landscapes/Features of Earth Undergone Dramatic Change

Several of the landscapes and features of the Earth have undergone a dramatic change since 1984. Google has made its prime update to Time-lapse with addition of four years of imagery, big amounts of new data together with a sharper view of the Earth from 1984 to 2016.

Latest images by Google’s Time-lapse application portrays how the features comprising of Alaska’s Columbia glacier and Dubai’s extensive cityscape tend to have drastically progressed in the last 32 years. Its Time-lapse visualisation of Earth, had first been released by Google in 2013, offering the most comprehensive image of our changing planet, made available to the public.

The communicating time-lapse experience permits people in exploring changes to the surface of the Earth like never before from observing the sprouting of Las Vegas strip to the retreat of Alaska’s Columbia glacier. Moreover, it enables user in exploring a variety of compelling locations much further than 1984. For instance, in London, one can make out the progress of the City Airport and the Olympic stadium in Stratford. On zooming in on the Aral Sea it portrays how it has been drying since the 1960s owing to Soviet irrigation programmes.

New Time-lapse Show Sharper View of Planet

If the date is moved to 2007, the volume of the Aral Sea seems to be reduced to about 10% of its original size. For the time being, over the past three decades, Alaska’s Columbia Glacier is observed to have retreated over 12 miles.Another city which has undergone drastic changes since 1984 is New York.

 In comparison to 1984 to 2016, it shows how much progress has been made around the Central Park area and Brooklyn. Programme Manager at Google Earth Engine, Chris Herwig, had commented that `in leveraging the same techniques were used in improving Google Maps and Google Earth back in June, the new Time-lapse showed a sharper view of our planet, with truer colours and less distracting artefacts’.

He further informed that using Google Earth Engine, they had combined over 5,000,000 satellite images, approximately 4 petabytes of data in creating 33 images of the complete planet, one for each year. He added that for the latest update, they had access to more images from the past due to the Landsat Global Archive Consolidation Program together with fresh images from two new satellites, namely Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2.

USGS/NASA - Landsat

The 33 new terapixel global images were then encoded into just over 25,000,000 overlapping multi-resolution video tiles, making interactively explorable by Carnegie Mellon CREATE Lab’s Time Machine library, which is a technology in creating and inspecting zoomable as well as pannable time-lapses over space and time.

In order to explore the feature, one could type in the name of a place in the search bar and move the timeline towards the bottom in opting for the year one would prefer to view. Images had been initially collected as part of constant joint mission between the United States Geological Survey –USGS and NASA known as Landsat.

 The Landsat mission’s satellites since the 1970s had been observing the Earth from space. The images have been sent back to Earth and archived on USGS tape drives which is an achievement that is much stress-free with the present digital technology than with analog tape in the 1970s. In order to make this historic archive of earth imagery available online, Google began working with USGS in 2009.