Google Earth gives you a fascinating 3D tour of the planet in your web browser, and the app’s new feature lets you look from today to 1984, so you can see how climate change has changed the face of the Earth in last 37 years.
Google itself has highlighted some specific areas you might want to try: the retreating Columbia Glacier in Alaska, for example, or the shifting coastline around Chatham, Massachusetts. You can see how the cities rise and the forests disappear in a jiffy through the laptop.
Go here in the browser to use the timelapse function. You can search for a specific place on Earth or browse one of five suggested time lapse categories: changing forests, fragile beauty, energy sources, warming planet, and urban sprawl.
You can also access more than 800 featured packages that Google has developed by visiting this page in your browser. See how ice flows recede, solar farms expand, rivers change course, lakes dry up and more, whether in 2D or 3D.
“Our planet has undergone rapid environmental change over the past half century, more than any other point in human history,” writes Rebecca Moore, director of Earth Engine & Outreach at Google Earth.
“Many of us have experienced these changes in our own communities; I myself was among the thousands of Californians evacuated from their homes during the state’s wildfires last year. For others, the effects of the change climate feel abstract and distant, like melting ice caps and retreating glaciers. “
The new timelapse feature uses about 24 million satellite photos collected by Google Earth. Along the way, data was collected from NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the European Union, and the European Space Agency (ESA).
Google says it took more than 2 million hours of processing to process these 20 petabytes of images into a single 4.4-pixel video mosaic, and to give you a sense of scale, that is, to the about 530,000 videos in 4K. Fortunately, Google used data centers with a 100% carbon-neutral renewable energy percentage for work.
The new images are free to access and use, like the rest of Google Earth, and it’s worth exploring how our planet has changed over the last 40 years. It’s not the same as visiting these places for real, but it can bring home the scale of the damage that climate change is causing, from the widening of deserts to the shrinking of glaciers.
“With Timelapse in Google Earth, we have a clearer picture of our changing planet at our fingertips, showing not only problems but also solutions, as well as fascinating natural phenomena that develop over decades,” Moore writes.