Google Earth gives you a fascinating 3D tour of the planet in your web browser, and the app’s newest feature lets you look back from the current day to 1984 – so you can see how climate change has changed the face of the Earth in the last 37 years. year old.
Google itself has highlighted a few areas in particular that you might want to check out: the retreating Columbia Glacier in Alaska, for example, or the changing coastline around Chatham, Massachusetts. You can see the cities rising and the forests disappear in an instant through your laptop.
Go here in your browser to use the timelapse feature for you. You can search for a specific place on Earth or browse one of the five suggested categories of timelapse: Changing Forests, Fragile Beauty, Energy Sources, Warming Planet and Expansion urban.
You can also access more than 800 highlighting packages that Google has made by visiting this page in your browser. See how ice flows recede, solar farms expand, rivers change course, lakes dry up, and more , either in 2D or 3D.
“Our planet has undergone rapid environmental change in the last half century – more than any other point in human history,” writes Rebecca Moore, director of Earth Engine & Outreach at Google Earth.
“Many of us have experienced these changes in our own communities; I myself was among thousands of Californians evacuated from their homes during last year’s state fires. For other people, the effects of climate change feel abstract and far away, such as melting ice caps and retreating glaciers. “
The new timelapse feature uses approximately 24 million satellite photos collected by Google Earth. Data from NASA, the US Geological Survey (USGS), the European Union and the European Space Agency (ESA) were collected along the way.
Google says it took more than 2 million hours of processing to process these 20 petabits of images into a single 4.4-mosaic video therapy – and to give you a sense of scale, which is about 530,000 4K videos. Fortunately, Google has used carbon-neutral, 100% renewable, energy-efficient data centers.
The new images have free access and use, just like the rest of Google Earth, and are worth exploring how our planet has changed in the last 40 years. It is not the same as visiting these places for real, but it can bring home the extent of the damage caused by climate change, from the widening of deserts to the reduction of glaciers.
“With Timelapse in Google Earth, we have a clearer picture of our changing planet at our fingertips – one that shows not only problems but also solutions, as well as fascinatingly beautiful natural phenomena that take place over the decades,” he writes. Moore.