Zoomable World Videos of Satellite Imagery For the Last 29 Years 42
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.
(OT) Websites crashing browsers (Score:3)
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.
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Just to clarify: "hardware acceleration" in browsers is NOT JUST FOR VIDEOS. These days everything including font rendering uses it - depending on the browser and the configuration.
And my FF 20 works just fine with that site (hardware acceleration is off, I did not test with it turned on).
Desalination (Score:2)
"Dubai opens UAE’s largest desalination plant"
http://www.waterworld.com/articles/2013/04/dubai-opens-uaes-largest-desalination-plant.html [waterworld.com]
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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.
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Gobi Desert (Score:2)
I just put in the Gobi Desert, and watched it getting smaller... What an interesting project. I bet a lot of researchers can use that kind of info.
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Okay, I must be blind. Where is the link to the site where you can choose what to look at? All I can find are the four canned videos.
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I see "DUBAI" "COLUMBIA GLACIER" "THE AMAZON" "LAS VEGAS" "EXPLORE THE WORLD" at the bottom of the page... It's the last one that leads to a page where you can search anywhere you want.
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Weird, I don't see that last link. I even searched the page for "explore" and got nothing. I tried with the lastest version of Firefox on windows, Iceweasel 10 & Chromium 6 on Debian.
Not Real-Time? (Score:3)
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No, this is geological super speed up. All of human civilization (the Anthropocene [wikipedia.org]) is likely to be just a small smudge on the geological time line.
History is vast.
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All of human civilization (the Anthropocene [wikipedia.org])...
I think you mean: All of human civillization (the Anthroporcine)...
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All of human civilization (the Anthropocene [wikipedia.org])...
I think you mean: All of human civillization (the Anthroporcine)...
This little Piggy went to market...
A better headline... (Score:2)
Heavily REDACTED Zoomable World Videos of Satellite Imagery For the Last 29 Years
j/k I doubt its been scrubbed considering the source (and potentially the resolution, I didn't RTFA).
Also Landsat is a great program. Being able to get satellite imagery real time from them as a ham radio operator was really cool.
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I was making a retarded joke but it must have been to complex for you to understand =)
What a load of.. (Score:1)
Re:What a load of.. (Score:4, 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 =)
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Huh...?
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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.
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It would have been cool if they had provided some different modes of display for those bands. One is infrared if I remember. That would be pretty neat to look at. Particularly over the ocean maybe.
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Am I hearing "This is threatening my world view" in the background? It's a satellite view, the satellites available in 1984 had a dramatically lower resolution than the amazing birds flying today... sheesh!
The key point here is that you can easily see important medium to large scale changes to the earth's surface. Glacial retreat, human development, the strip mining of Canada for tar oil and the Amazon for resources. Anybody not familiar with these events over the last 30 years has either had their head bur
Essence (Score:3)
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.
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Some interesting cities to check are probably Salt Lake City UT which grew a lot the last two decades. Maybe Tampa FL as well.
We are indeed a carbon based infestation of the creators home world. But whether thats good or bad is not for me to judge.
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Aral Sea (Score:3)
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First thing I looked for. Astounding when you consider the scale of it.
Growth... (Score:1)