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Google Earth's Timelapses Offer a 32-Year Look At Earth's Changing Surface (pcmag.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the before-and-after dept.

Google has partnered with TIME to release an improved version of Google Earth Timelapse that provides animated satellite imagery covering the past 32 years, from 1984 to 2016. In 2013, Google and TIME launched Timelapse with a time-lapse from 1984 to 2012. However, this time around the project uses the higher-resolution maps introduced back in June to provide a look that's more detailed and more seamless than in the past. ZDNet reports: The 10-second snapshots of Earth from space over 32 years captures urban sprawl, deforestation and reforestation, receding glaciers, and major engineering feats, such as the Oresund Bridge connecting Denmark to Sweden, or the spread of the Alberta Tar Sands in Canada. Google Earth engine program manager, Chris Herwig says it created the new "annual mosaics" by stitching together 33 images of the Earth, each representing one year. Each image contains 3.95 trillion pixels, cherry-picked from an original set of three quadrillion pixels. "Using Google Earth Engine, we sifted through about three quadrillion pixels, that's three followed by 15 zeroes, from more than 5,000,000 satellite images," Herwig said. "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 time-lapses over space and time." The satellite images come from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and US Geological Survey. Since 2015, they also contain some data from the European Space Agency's Copernicus Program and its Sentinel-2A satellite.

4 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. Agent Smith by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    "I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure."

    1. Re:Agent Smith by iggymanz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Agent Smith was ignorant of biology. Mammals of all kinds can overpopulate, exhaust resources and cause themselves starvation, disease and misery.

    2. Re:Agent Smith by iggymanz · · Score: 2, Insightful

      But some like the OP were quoting the movie as if that were scientific fact. Have to help out these people that get their facts from sci-fi movies and twitter, there are a lot of them

  2. Re:What the fuck!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    > First off it is the States that elect the President of the States, not the people.

    This is a problem. We live in an Alexander Hamiltonian eventuality, where the States are so marginalized they only matter historically. I happened to get my choice this time, but I'm conservative at heart and believe the States' powers are gone, never to return. If that had been known (the income tax made this permanent) we can say with 20/20 hindsight state political power never should have been negotiated but *history*. Today, one "man" one vote, fuck the nonsense that states dictate other states...populations exist and if you don't like the population centers in the US (the batshit crazy liberals packed together like in a mouse utopia, with similar results) you can leave.