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Zoomable World Videos of Satellite Imagery For the Last 29 Years

Posted by timothy on from the corpus-terra dept.

New submitter simonff writes "Yearly composites of 30-meter Landsat imagery were used by Google and Time to produce zoomable, scrollable videos of changes in land surface since 1984." So now you can watch glaciers shrink and Vegas gobble up the desert, in what we're all lucky is not real time.

28 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. Gobi Desert by canadiannomad · · Score: 1

    I just put in the Gobi Desert, and watched it getting smaller... What an interesting project. I bet a lot of researchers can use that kind of info.

    --
    Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
    1. Re:Gobi Desert by pavon · · Score: 1

      Okay, I must be blind. Where is the link to the site where you can choose what to look at? All I can find are the four canned videos.

    2. Re:Gobi Desert by canadiannomad · · Score: 1

      I see "DUBAI" "COLUMBIA GLACIER" "THE AMAZON" "LAS VEGAS" "EXPLORE THE WORLD" at the bottom of the page... It's the last one that leads to a page where you can search anywhere you want.

      --
      Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
    3. Re:Gobi Desert by pavon · · Score: 1

      Weird, I don't see that last link. I even searched the page for "explore" and got nothing. I tried with the lastest version of Firefox on windows, Iceweasel 10 & Chromium 6 on Debian.

  2. (OT) Websites crashing browsers by mha · · Score: 2

    What browser? I had a website crashing my Firefox. Turned out I had to turn off hardware acceleration in about:config, because somehow this feature caused an error in the (NVidia) video driver.

    1. Re:(OT) Websites crashing browsers by markjhood2003 · · Score: 1

      The web site is totally useless with Firefox 17.0.5 (latest ESR). If there are videos there, I can't see them, just a bunch of badly laid out text and play buttons that bring you back to the top image on the page.

    2. Re:(OT) Websites crashing browsers by mha · · Score: 1

      Just to clarify: "hardware acceleration" in browsers is NOT JUST FOR VIDEOS. These days everything including font rendering uses it - depending on the browser and the configuration.

      And my FF 20 works just fine with that site (hardware acceleration is off, I did not test with it turned on).

  3. Desalination by mha · · Score: 1

    "Dubai opens UAE’s largest desalination plant"

    http://www.waterworld.com/articles/2013/04/dubai-opens-uaes-largest-desalination-plant.html

  4. Re:unintended consequences by Njovich · · Score: 2

    Desalination. It seems completely inviable from a western perspective, with the amount of energy it takes. But then you'd forget they have a lot of energy in the emirates.

  5. Not Real-Time? by FurtiveGlancer · · Score: 2

    But this is geologic real-time!

    --
    Invenio via vel creo
    1. Re:Not Real-Time? by ColdWetDog · · Score: 1

      No, this is geological super speed up. All of human civilization (the Anthropocene) is likely to be just a small smudge on the geological time line.

      History is vast.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    2. Re:Not Real-Time? by VortexCortex · · Score: 1

      All of human civilization (the Anthropocene)...

      I think you mean: All of human civillization (the Anthroporcine)...

    3. Re:Not Real-Time? by Genda · · Score: 1

      All of human civilization (the Anthropocene)...

      I think you mean: All of human civillization (the Anthroporcine)...

      This little Piggy went to market...

  6. A better headline... by flayzernax · · Score: 1

    Heavily REDACTED Zoomable World Videos of Satellite Imagery For the Last 29 Years

    j/k I doubt its been scrubbed considering the source (and potentially the resolution, I didn't RTFA).

    Also Landsat is a great program. Being able to get satellite imagery real time from them as a ham radio operator was really cool.

    1. Re:A better headline... by flayzernax · · Score: 1

      I was making a retarded joke but it must have been to complex for you to understand =)

  7. What a load of.. by frootcakeuk · · Score: 1

    Am I the only one that thinks this is a complete pile of doctored crap? While it is amazing to see the time lapse of Dubai coming out of nowhere, it is very difficult to see anything at all! Google made a claim to have "X-amount of super hd screens per frame", does that explain why approx 4 pixels per mile change in a year? Where is the detail? Why can't we zoom in? If Google & Time went to such effort to show us this, then why aren't they showing us? Not being ridiculous but given the original material, I could've whipped up that in a week. Until we see more than 1 mile a cm i'm calling bullshit on this one!

    --
    Remember kids: What's right isn't as important as what's profitable.
    1. Re:What a load of.. by flayzernax · · Score: 3, Informative

      Landsat wasn't meant for high res spying. Its a very functional site. You can even put in Groom, Lake Nm and get something other then a big black square. I found that time lapse interesting =) It shows the facility is still active and there's development in one of the restricted airspace areas south-east ish.

      I'm really impressed with how fast it searches to a location. You can pause the play through at any given point.

      Have fun with it =)

    2. Re:What a load of.. by flimflammer · · Score: 1

      Huh...?

    3. Re:What a load of.. by JWW · · Score: 2

      Landsat pixels are 30m. It is a moderate resolution satellite, not a high res one.

      Its a tradeoff, you get better time coverage and a larger viewing area with larger pixels, you get worse coverage and a smaller image with smaller pixels but better detail.

      Also other factors affect coverage, which in the best case is once every 16 days. So a few cloudy days or gaps in the data and the pixels won't change very fast.

    4. Re:What a load of.. by flayzernax · · Score: 1

      It would have been cool if they had provided some different modes of display for those bands. One is infrared if I remember. That would be pretty neat to look at. Particularly over the ocean maybe.

    5. Re:What a load of.. by Genda · · Score: 1

      Am I hearing "This is threatening my world view" in the background? It's a satellite view, the satellites available in 1984 had a dramatically lower resolution than the amazing birds flying today... sheesh!

      The key point here is that you can easily see important medium to large scale changes to the earth's surface. Glacial retreat, human development, the strip mining of Canada for tar oil and the Amazon for resources. Anybody not familiar with these events over the last 30 years has either had their head buried in the sand (tar sand?) or has a political agenda that verges on fundamentalist religion (complete with belief system that displaces logic or clear and irrefutable scientific evidence.)

      We are drowning in corporate stories of unbridled greed and the wholesale destruction of society, Nestle is trying to push a global patent on the medicinal use of Fennel Flower, a curative that has been well documented for thousands of years. Disney was trying to trademark "Dia de los Muertos" and only when the Hispanic community howled with outrage did they change their minds. Even now the American Supreme Court is hearing whether or not corporations should be able to OWN as patents HUMAN GENES. This has grown into a full on disaster. Because there are companies that have been patenting genes in cows and pigs for years now (think transgenic livestock) and many of those very same genes exist in human being so guess what, somebody owns a piece of you. If fact the best guess is that at this point in time every bit of your genome belongs to somebody. You've been chopped up (like those real estate loan bundles) and your bits now belong to a variety of corporations. You might say so what, here's an example of the problem, Myriad Genetics owns the patents on BRCA1 and BRCA2. They saw a gold mine in the human genome and have been cashing in for over a decade. Because they have patents, the only tests for these two oncogenes you can get are their tests. They've been able to keep the price of these tests incredibly high (because they have a corner on the market) and there are now tests that are BETTER, FASTER and infinitely less expensive, but you can't use them because of the patent. The result is that many thousands of women have screened with false negatives and died of breast and ovarian cancers, with a better test in plain sight, that they can't get.

      I liked Atlas Shrugged as much as the next person, but for every visionary Dagny Taggart out there, there are ten Gordon Gekkos. Greedy, self serving, money grubbing bastards who'd part their own Moms out for seed capital. You can't swing a stick any more without hitting the damage done to our society or our government by greedy people bent on inflicting their wealth and egos on society. So I say to the Libertarians, by all means, please shrink government to its logical minimum (but no more please), ensure the greatest amount of civil liberties (but remember while exercising your Second Amendment rights, that your bullets don't recognize property lines), and please take off the rose colored glasses with regards to rampant, unbridled capitalism. It's rapacious, and prone to cannibalizing the very society in which it lives. Even Adam Smith warned of the dangers of monopolies and erosion of the middle class. Control rods like Glass Steagall aren't just niceties, they're full on necessities. The banks are mainlining OE, they're clearly addicted, the economy is inflating again, property values just had their highest jump in a single month in living memory, we just set a new record on the Stock Exchange and you can already smell the smoke from the fire that will set off the next blowout, and you best believe it will dwarf the previous economic blowouts. Its time far sanity children, because the craziness is getting life threatening.

  8. Essence by Mike+Frett · · Score: 2

    Looks like some time lapse of larvae consuming road kill. Is this what Humanity has become, a Virus?. Check out Shanghai, the whole thing just blossomed out; consuming all vegetation and life in it's path. Some scary stuff, but still cool.

    1. Re:Essence by flayzernax · · Score: 1

      Some interesting cities to check are probably Salt Lake City UT which grew a lot the last two decades. Maybe Tampa FL as well.

      We are indeed a carbon based infestation of the creators home world. But whether thats good or bad is not for me to judge.

    2. Re:Essence by slashmydots · · Score: 1

      Or Detroit, which would look like Sim City 2000 on Cheetah speed when you raise the taxes to 20% and sell the sole power plant, lol.

  9. Aral Sea by mayko · · Score: 2

    I'm surprised they don't mention the Aral Sea. Once the 4th largest lake in the world... the time lapse is pretty staggering to watch.

    1. Re:Aral Sea by Intropy · · Score: 1

      First thing I looked for. Astounding when you consider the scale of it.

  10. Re:unintended consequences by immaterial · · Score: 1

    So inviable to westerners that there are over a dozen such plants built or under construction in the US.

  11. Growth... by scumfuker · · Score: 1

    Time lapse of city growth always looks quite like time lapse of mould... Just saying.