Google Earth have introduced its new Timelapse feature, which shows the way in which the world has changed over the course of 37 years, in a few seconds.
Spoiler: It’s not good news.
The impressive, if depressing, feature uses satellite imagery captured since 1984 to show melting glaciers, logged forests, and the rise of megacities. You can pause at any given year along the timeline, and zoom in on areas of interest.
A massive playlist showing 208 different regions, from Venice, to the Amazon to outback Australia will depress you for hours.
The company explained their methods in a blog post: “Using Google Earth Engine, Google’s cloud platform for petabyte-scale geospatial analysis, we combined more than 15 million satellite images (roughly 10 quadrillion pixels) to create the 35 global cloud-free images that make up Timelapse.
“These images come from the U.S. Geological Survey/NASA Landsat and European Sentinel programs. Once again, we joined forces with our friends at Carnegie Mellon’s CREATE Lab, whose Time Machine video technology makes Timelapse interactively explorable.”
