Google Reveals the Evolution of Our Planet in Timelapse Motion

Yes­ter­day Google released a trove of time­lapse images that offers, it believes, “the most com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture of our chang­ing plan­et ever made avail­able to the pub­lic.” Fea­tur­ing a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry of images tak­en from space by NASA and the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey, the repos­i­to­ry lets you wit­ness the retreat of glac­i­ers (see above), the defor­esta­tion of wide swathes of rain­for­est, the growth of sprawl­ing cities, and the build­ing of huge arti­fi­cial islands, all hap­pen­ing in time­lapse motion.

To cre­ate its Time­lapse web­site, Google “sift­ed through 2,068,467 images—a total of 909 ter­abytes of data—to find the high­est-qual­i­ty pix­els … for every year since 1984 and for every spot on Earth.” They then used this data to cre­ate com­pos­ite images for each year, all view­able in brows­able HTML5 ani­ma­tion. Some strik­ing images have also been post­ed on Google+.

via Google

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

Per­pet­u­al Ocean: A Van Gogh-Like Visu­al­iza­tion of our Ocean Cur­rents

Har­vard Thinks Green: Big Ideas from 6 All-Star Envi­ron­ment Profs