Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.

31 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: 1, Informative

      I meant his nonsense about mammals being in equilibrium with environment, that's pure bullshit.

    3. 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

    4. Re:Agent Smith by Brett+Buck · · Score: 3, Interesting

      In fact, every organism expands to the limits of the resources and competition. Living on the edge of starvation is the default condition.

            In fact, only until the agricultural revolution was this ever any other way. This enabled a massive population increase. The second occurrence was the industrial revolution, which yielded another massive population increase from which the world is still undergoing.

              The former yielded the first kings, etc, because it permitted a small fraction of the population to live above subsistence. The industrial revolution and modern economics (capitalism) was the first time in the existence of any population that large fractions of a species lived in a state better than that.

    5. Re:Agent Smith by pmotuja · · Score: 1

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

      We are the only mammal that has created computer technology though. Or come up with interesting ideas like how the universe may be a simulation. When it comes to living on planet earth though, sometimes it kinda seems like we are winging it. Big picture wise.

    6. Re:Agent Smith by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      The difference is that humans have been shifting the equilibrium ever since the neolithic revolution, meaning that "overpopulation" hasn't really meant the same thing for humans that it did for animals.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    7. Re:Agent Smith by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      But they are. If there's too many of them, they die. If there's too few of them, they reproduce (roughly sigmoidally).

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    8. Re:Agent Smith by Bongo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      In fact, every organism expands to the limits of the resources and competition. Living on the edge of starvation is the default condition.

      In fact, only until the agricultural revolution was this ever any other way. This enabled a massive population increase. The second occurrence was the industrial revolution, which yielded another massive population increase from which the world is still undergoing.

      The former yielded the first kings, etc, because it permitted a small fraction of the population to live above subsistence. The industrial revolution and modern economics (capitalism) was the first time in the existence of any population that large fractions of a species lived in a state better than that.

      Agriculture, from the point of view of human diet, was a huge compromise, it now seems, if you follow the Paleo movement. We started evolving maybe 2 million years ago, and in all that time we grew to become adapted to hunting and some gathering, but essentially, we are very fit for sweaty long distance running, and with some tracking, can eventually run other big animals to death. But then we invented agriculture, which was only 10 or 12 thousand years ago. Then with modern farming we changed the nature of the stuff we were growing even further. And all this is taken as a *hint* that we are not adapted to modern diets largely comprised of industrially grown grains and sugars. Those paleo ancestors didn't have to carb load to run the distances they did, their bodies were adapted to run on fat stores, and modern athletes are starting to experiment with this and discover that yeah, you really can burn better on fat. So then, was agriculture a huge mistake?

      Well, it got us here, it allowed our populations to grow, allowed more people to live together, and as you say, have Kings and later Parliaments, and so the whole social structure adapted and evolved to the need to integrate ever larger numbers. Empires worked for thousands of years but they eventually crumbled under the sheer weight of their own expansive and "too hard to administer" centralised control.

      So we eventually created the "individual" and say that the individual should have more power to make local decisions, and so you have the notion that, in a modern economy, the brain power is more distributed, and so can process more variables, more local differences, and so the system still manages to work, when an empire would have crumbled already.

      So that brings me to the point of this, and that is, agriculture and industrialisation, Empires and Democracies, have got us this far, but what is next?

      The world is still developing, but many of the cultures are still recoiling at globalisation and development. People compare humanity to a petri dish and imagine that we will at some point reach the edge of the dish, and having consumed everything, collapse. Because, you know, humans have the brain power of an amoeba.

      I think what is closer to the truth is that we have always and always shall be faced with the problem of survival. We faced it when we were hunter gatherers, we faced it when we were dying of the plague in medieval Europe, we faced it again and again and always shall face it. We are living biological machines in an environment which is nicely-called "Nature" but nature is a bitch.

      So the question is how to survive, and a fashionable answer is that we should stop consuming. Well, that's like trying to breathe more slowly when you are trapped in a hole with limited air. Sure... that'll buy you some time, but that is not sustainable. The real answers are about inventing a way to get out of the hole.

      As humans we have imagination and creativity and reason and intuition, and "sustainability" means inventing a heck of a lot of new stuff, yes, stuff, which will then make life easier for everyone. The natural birth rate for people, women if their children survive, is 2 children per couple. We don't overpopulate because we have too

    9. Re:Agent Smith by tburkhol · · Score: 1

      "Equilibrium" connotes steady state. Smith's rant argues that an ecosystem can reach a steady state, where the reality is they are oscillatory and often unstable. The reality is that mammalian (and other) species go extinct all the time, even without human influence.

      The utopian dream where the apex predator kills off old herbivores just as fast as new ones are born is a mathematician's view of ecosystems, and it's based on the assumption of massless, frictionless, spherical predators.

    10. Re:Agent Smith by tekkahtek · · Score: 1

      I'm not sure what Agent Smith has to do with satellite time lapse view or why a comment about mammals overpopulating can get modded up to an insightful 5. Mammals also defecate--now that is truly insightful or at least as insightful as the fact that they/we breed and if they/we do that a lot there will be too many of them/us.

      Here's some truly deep insight for you: Some people can string words together and other people will think they make sense. (e.g. I am the eggman / They are the eggmen / I am the walrus / Goo goo g' joob). Put that in your pipe an smoke it.

      I expect this comment to be quickly modded up to an insightful 5 as well as an informative 5 and a just plain silly 5.

    11. Re:Agent Smith by snookiex · · Score: 1

      The problem is that we don't have a natural predator. We're on top of the food chain and are free to mate, expand and deplete all resources. Not to mention that, unlike other species, we're consciously selfish.

      --
      Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
    12. Re:Agent Smith by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Animals often find a dynamic equilibrium, not a static one. That is, they go through periods of explosive population growth, mass die-out, slow build up, explosive growth, mass die-out and so on. It's an equilibrium in the sense that it's emergent (semi) cyclic behaviour of a chaotic system, and hence typically stays within fixed limits, but it's not all co-operation and rainbows - it's a whole bunch of animals desperately fighting to survive in an environment of finite resources and dangerously unpredictable competition.

      The hope is that humans can use their much vaunted brains to break out of this unpleasant overpopulation / mass die-out cycle and impose an artificial static equilibrium where they can live happy lives without fear of unpleasant early death, but based on current behaviour patterns it seems more likely that we're headed for another massive die-out event. Except that we'll probably take out a lot more species than most mass die-out events thanks to the scale of our explosive population growth over the last few centuries.

  2. Street View "Time-Capsule" by davesays · · Score: 1

    I always thought it would be cool if people could submit their personal photos of a place/time/angle and have those incorporated into street view. I think it would be super cool to see the same street corner (neighborhood, house you grew up in) through a timeline...

  3. Like to see it go back to the dawn of time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    2500 B.C. and everybody watch the dinosaurs.

    1. Re:Like to see it go back to the dawn of time by OneHundredAndTen · · Score: 1

      2500 B.C. and everybody watch the dinosaurs.

      In 2500 BC? Where did you not learn any biology?

    2. Re:Like to see it go back to the dawn of time by ryllharu · · Score: 1

      My kingdom for a "Brilliant Troll +1" mod.

  4. 500 AD and watch deforestation in action by presidenteloco · · Score: 3, Informative

    England and Western Europe, for example, were forests.

    In Canada, US, and South America, you only need to go back a couple of hundred years to get good perspective on the extent and acceleration of deforestation.

    --

    Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
    1. Re:500 AD and watch deforestation in action by BigDogCH · · Score: 1

      Correct, we even have a shortage now of many prairie types. Do we have too many trees? After reading your comment, my first thought was, "i wonder how much carbon we have sequestered with these trees?". Did we alleviate any significant C02 burden with this? Maybe we simply masked a bigger problem? Maybe we need to bury all these trees and start some fresh ones to capture more C02. Everyone should bury their christmas tree!

  5. Re:What the fuck!? by PopeRatzo · · Score: 3, Funny

    Nothing in this article has a thing to do with Trump! Is slashdot jumping the shark or something?

    When it comes right down to it. Trump just isn't that interesting.

    Hannah Arendt called it the "banality of evil".

    But if you're really missing the Trump news, I'll help you out. We're now up to a 2.5 million vote lead for Hillary. You know that's got to frost Trump's cornflakes. And speaking of cornflakes, Trump supporters are now pushing a boycott of Kellogs since Kellogs pulled their ads from Breitbart because, and I quote, "That place is a real shit show of fake news and crap-posting, racism, bigotry and hatred. We might as well advertise on fucking Stormfront." That's not an exact quote as far as I know, but it could be.

    The kicker is that they're calling this boycott #DumpKellogs and to show Kellogs they mean business, they're buying Kellogs products and taking selfies of them dumping the products into the garbage. Pure genius, I tell you. This comes on the heels of the successful Hamilton and Starbucks boycotts.

    Also, to prove he's gonna drain the swamp and fight for the little guy, Donald Trump, Mitt Romney and something called a "Reince Priebus" had a swank dinner last night at some fancy French restaurant (a Trump property) called Pepe Lepew's or something. They had (I'm not making this up), frog legs and fresh marshmallows. The intimate dinner for three cost over $1000, even though they didn't drink wine or any other spirits. Trump made Romney strip down to his magic underwear and suck his dick, but only after Mitt bussed the table and apologize for having better hair than Trump.

    I'm pretty sure that brings you up to date on all the Trump news you need to hear. Oh, and he's appointing some Goldman Sachs billionaire named Mnuchin to run the Treasury Department. Consider the swamp drained.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  6. Sink by dohzer · · Score: 1

    Hey look, you can see San Francisco's Millennium Tower sinking.

  7. Re:What the fuck!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    This article is about Google Earth's Timelapses. So go peddle your agenda somewhere else and fuck off and die.

  8. Re:Still no real photos of the whole Earth.... by dfm3 · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's because of the way the images have to be captured. A photograph that records the wavelengths our eyes can perceive would produce an image obscured by things like cloud cover, and it could take many passes over many days before you luck out and happen to snap the picture on that one clear day that isn't cloudy. So, the satellite makes one pass and captures multiple images in infrared and other wavelengths that penetrate clouds, moisture, particulates, or smog. Then, all of those data are compiled into one composite image and converted to colors that more closely match what our eyes would perceive.

    This is done not only to produce an unobscured image, but also because the information that we can gleam from various wavelengths is more useful. For example, parts of the spectrum like microwave or infrared can be used to determine vegetation density or even distinguish different species of plants, or can indicate things like heat absorption of different surfaces or ice thickness. That stuff can't be done with visible light alone.

  9. Re:I don't believe this by hypertex · · Score: 2

    Yes

  10. Re:What the fuck!? by 110010001000 · · Score: 3, Informative

    No he didn't. He won 2,600 out of the 3,100 counties. Why are you lying?

  11. Re: What the fuck!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Democracy is a broken form of government,

    This doesn't mean anything. Type away keyboard cowboy

  12. Re:What the fuck!? by tbannist · · Score: 3, Interesting

    According to this breakdown Trump won the popular vote in 2,584 counties and Clinton won the popular vote in 472 counties.

    --
    Fanatically anti-fanatical
  13. I don't see shorelines changing at all. by Bartles · · Score: 1

    At all.

    1. Re:I don't see shorelines changing at all. by Bamfarooni · · Score: 2

      Look harder?

      https://earthengine.google.com...
      https://earthengine.google.com...
      https://earthengine.google.com...
      https://earthengine.google.com...
      https://earthengine.google.com...
      https://earthengine.google.com...
      https://earthengine.google.com...
      https://earthengine.google.com...
      https://earthengine.google.com...
      https://earthengine.google.com...

    2. Re:I don't see shorelines changing at all. by Bartles · · Score: 1

      The ones that aren't obviously sandbars moving as sandbars do, actually seem to show shorelines advancing rather than receding.

  14. Re:What the fuck!? by bheerssen · · Score: 1

    Exactly! Everyone knows urban votes don't matter as much as rural and suburban votes. That's really what you're saying, right?

    --
    (Score: -1, Stupid)