Google Earth Timelapse Lets You Explore the Globe and Watch It Change Over a 32 Year Span

 

Google Timelapse is a global, zoomable video that lets you see how the Earth has changed over the past 32 years. It is made from 33 cloud-free annual mosaics, one for each year from 1984 to 2016, which are made interactively explorable by Carnegie Mellon University CREATE Lab’s Time Machine library, a technology for creating and viewing zoomable and pannable timelapses over space and time.

Using Google Earth Engine, the Timelapse team sifted through about three quadrillion pixels (that’s 3 followed by 15 zeroes) from more than 5 million satellite images acquired over the past three decades by 5 different satellites.

The team then took the best of all those pixels to create 33 images of the entire planet, one for each year. They then encoded these new 3.95 terapixel global images into just over 25 million overlapping multi-resolution video tiles.

Check out the embedded global, zoomable video below to explore Google Earth Timelapse! For more information visit the official website here.