Slashdot Mirror


Zoomable World Videos of Satellite Imagery For the Last 29 Years

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.

7 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. (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.

  2. 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.

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

    But this is geologic real-time!

    --
    Invenio via vel creo
  4. 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.

  5. 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 =)

  6. 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.

  7. 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.