"Our most detailed view of Earth across space and time"

November 29, 2016 8:07 PM

Google has released an update to their Google Earth Timelapse feature that provides for a longer time horizon and a much greater level of detail than has been previously available.

Using Google Earth Engine, we sifted through about three quadrillion pixels—that's 3 followed by 15 zeroes—from more than 5,000,000 satellite images. For this latest update, we had access to more images from the past, thanks to the Landsat Global Archive Consolidation Program, and fresh images from two new satellites, Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2.

We took the best of all those pixels to create 33 images of the entire planet, one for each year. We then encoded these new 3.95 terapixel global images into just over 25,000,000 overlapping multi-resolution video tiles, made interactively explorable by Carnegie Mellon CREATE Lab's Time Machine library, a technology for creating and viewing zoomable and pannable timelapses over space and time.

More coverage from The Verge: Google Earth’s Timelapse update illustrates 30 years of climate change

The team behind Google Earth released an update today to the timelapse feature of its satellite imagery app, and it’s a great way to see the rapid pace of urban development and public infrastructure projects like the San Francisco Bay Bridge. It’s a cool feature, letting anyone jump into any location and watch as is morphs over the years. But there’s another, more sobering and neccesary function of Google Earth: seeing how human-driven climate change has transformed the planet in just 32 years time.

posted by tonycpsu (9 comments total)

Well at least it's not just my imagination that Australia's become even more of a dried out husk over my lifetime (which this time lapse seems to roughly represent). And if you point it at my city (Melbourne) the suburban sprawl is also pretty creepy. I'm almost too afraid to look at stuff like China's industrial cities.
This does not cheer my heart.

Edit: yep, checked out a few more locations. Horrifying. I need a lie down. Or an environmentalist revolution. Whichever can be organised sooner.
posted by threecheesetrees at 9:33 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Shanghai's growth over the years is phenomenal, like a SimCity timelapse. Dubai's artificial archipelago's are impressive -- until you realize they're half-empty. 9/11 wasn't as impactful as you'd think. The Aral Sea is just depressing.

In other Google Earth news, there is now a free VR edition for the HTC Vive and it is utterly mind-blowing. If you haven't used the program in awhile, they've jettisoned their reliance on user-submitted SketchUp models of 3D buildings and replaced them with aerial stereophotogrammetry that can render dozens of square miles in stunning detail. In VR you can swoop through canyons, Godzilla-stomp around skyscrapers, and peer at airports and suburbs like they're children's toys. Just watching videos of people trying it is a joy.

I just wonder how long we have till the next spring cleaning shuts it all down...
posted by Rhaomi at 9:53 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's pretty cool to zoom in on Mt St Helens and watch the regrowth. the eruption, alas, was more than 30 yrs ago, but seeing the forest return is kinda cool and heartening.
posted by OHenryPacey at 10:17 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

I stepped through year by year looking at my hometown of Las Cruces, which I more or less lived in (school took me away, etc) until I was 29, leaving in 1996. I go back every year at least once for a long weekend, and I'm always amazed at how much the parts of the city that I know from growing up haven't changed THAT much while year by year you can see giant blocks of desert turn from natural ground to much more reflective (because flattened) light tan dirt and then into buildings, year by year, step by step. Watching this process from a satellite view is both fascinating and a bit horrifying.
posted by hippybear at 1:37 AM on November 30, 2016

Around here, it's mostly the same - the two things that popup the most are the construction of a new stadium in 2001 and the development of the inner orbital, and a byproduct of it - the urbanization of the (then mostly rural) north and northeastern part of the city, as well as the suburbs.
posted by lmfsilva at 4:01 AM on November 30, 2016

The glaciers disappearing. Damn.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 4:09 AM on November 30, 2016

Mind-blowing: Hong Kong. New airport island, new bridges, huge amounts of reclamation, tunnels.
Mind-blowing-er: Macau, which seemed to double or triple in land area.
posted by mdonley at 5:49 AM on November 30, 2016

Check out Fort McMurray and Fort MacKay (just to the north).
posted by Prunesquallor at 6:32 AM on November 30, 2016

This is a wonderful visualization tool I've wished for since I was a kid. Can you imagine what this would look like with, say, 100 years of high density images?

I went place by place through everywhere I've lived. Watched the farming community where I grew up get eaten by the Interstate sprawl; the extension of light rail into the town where I was an exchange student; the reshaping of Columbia Heights and the 14th St NW corridor in DC; the Station fire scar in LA; the new Bay Bridge in SF. Even just parking the view over the San Gabriels gives you a stroboscopic view of burn scars flashing by every year. Just... wow.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 1:07 PM on November 30, 2016