As you might expect, there is a lot of human-based growth, and while we look at how cities like Las Vegas, Shanghai and Dubai have expanded, it’s interesting, but it also talks about how much nature has been lost in the last decades. Below is a gallery of locations such as Dubai, New York, Antarctica and Alaska and how they looked from above in 1985, followed by a picture of the same location in 2020.
“Using Earth Engine, we’ve combined over 15 million satellite images from five different satellites collected over the past few decades,” reads Google Earth’s About the New Timelapse feature. “Most of the images come from Landsat, a joint USGS / NASA Earth observation program that has observed Earth since the 1970s. Since 2015, we have combined Landsat images with images from the Sentinel-2 mission, part of the European Union and the Earth Observation Program. Earth Copernicus of the European Space Agency. “
The feature allows you to search for individual places on Earth, but Google has teamed up with Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE lab to create a “Stories” section that contains five unique stories: Changing Forests, Fragile Beauty, Energy Sources, Warming Planet, and Expansion urban.
Each story presents multiple locations based on a theme. For example, the story of Changing Forests shows the effects of deforestation and also highlights several forest restoration projects that have taken place around the globe.All five stories and the rest of the world can be viewed in Google Earth’s new Timelapse hub and are worth a look. For more scientific stories like this, read about how crystal caves show that sea level was raised to 50 feet in a warm period in history, and then check out this story about a space hurricane that rained electrons charged above. North Pole.
Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer, guide producer. and science guru for IGN. You can follow him further Twitter @LeBlancWes.