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Google Earth's Timelapses Offer a 32-Year Look At Earth's Changing Surface (pcmag.com) 85

Posted by BeauHD 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.
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Google Earth's Timelapses Offer a 32-Year Look At Earth's Changing Surface More

Google Earth's Timelapses Offer a 32-Year Look At Earth's Changing Surface

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  • Agent Smith (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "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 sam

    • Re:Agent Smith (Score:5, Insightful)

      by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Thursday December 01, 2016 @12:32AM (#53399293)

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

      • Re:Agent Smith (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Brett Buck ( 811747 ) on Thursday December 01, 2016 @02:05AM (#53399597)

        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.

        • Re:Agent Smith (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Bongo ( 13261 ) on Thursday December 01, 2016 @06:16AM (#53400229)

          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

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by pmotuja ( 787913 )

        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.

      • 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.

      • 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

      • 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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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 unpredict

  • 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...

  • Like to see it go back to the dawn of time (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01, 2016 @12:24AM (#53399255)

    2500 B.C. and everybody watch the dinosaurs.

    • 500 AD and watch deforestation in action (Score:4, Informative)

      by presidenteloco ( 659168 ) on Thursday December 01, 2016 @12:45AM (#53399335)

      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.

    • 2500 B.C. and everybody watch the dinosaurs.

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

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

  • Sink (Score:2)

    by dohzer ( 867770 )

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

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