SAN RAMON, California (AP): The Google Earth app adds a new video feature that builds on nearly four decades of satellite imagery to vividly illustrate how climate change has affected glaciers, beaches, forests and other places in the world.
The tool was unveiled Thursday is developing into what is being billed as the biggest update to Google Earth in five years. Google says it undertook the complex project in collaboration with several government agencies, including NASA in the United States and its European counterpart, in hopes of helping a mass audience understand the sometimes abstract concept of climate change in more tangible terms through its free Earth app.
Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald believes the mission can be accomplished.
“This is amazing,” he told The Associated Press after seeing a preview of the new feature. “Trying to get people to understand the scope of climate change and the problem of land use is so difficult because of the long time and the spatial scales. I wouldn’t be surprised if this bit of software changed the minds of many people about the magnitude of the impact of humans on the environment. “
This is not the first time time-lapse satellite imagery has been used to show how parts of the world are changing before our eyes due to climate change. Most scientists agree that climate change is caused by pollution caused mainly by humans.
But the previous images have focused mainly on the melting of glaciers and have not been widely available in an already popular application such as Google Earth, which can be downloaded to most of the more than 3 billion smartphones that are they are now used all over the world.
Google promises that people will be able to see a time lapse presentation almost anywhere they want to search. The feature also includes a storytelling mode where 800 different places are highlighted on the planet in both 2D and 3D formats. These videos will also be available on Google’s YouTube video site, a more widely used service than the Earth app.
The feature was created from 24 million satellite images taken each year from 1984 to 2020 and provided by NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey and the European Union, according to Google. Time lapse technology was created with the help of Carnegie Mellon University.
Google plans to update time-lapse images at least once a year.
——
AP science writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this story from Washington.