First Posted: May 09, 2013 01:01 PM EDT
If you wanted to catch a glimpse of how our Earth has changed over time, now you can. Google has expanded its mapping platform by launching a new project called Timelapse. This latest project warps you about 30 years into the past and allows you to see how the planet has changed since then. (Photo : Google/Timelapse/Screen Capture)
If you wanted to catch a glimpse of how our Earth has changed over time, now you can. Google has expanded its mapping platform by launching a new project called Timelapse. This latest project warps you about 30 years into the past and allows you to see how the planet has changed since then.
The whole project is possible due to NASA's Landsat program. This series of satellites constantly orbit our planet, examining Earth's surface and taking images of the changes that it undergoes. Over time, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) accumulated millions of pictures that, when stitched together, could create a high-definition slideshow of Earth's ever-changing surface.
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Actually creating these moving slideshows wasn't easy, though. According to the Verge, Google trawled through 909 terabytes of data to find the clearest images of Earth taken every year between 1984 and 2012. The company then collaborated with the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University in order to make them into easily viewable HTML5 locations. The researchers had to scrub away cloud cover, fill in missing pixels and then digitally stitch puzzle-piece pictures together. The result is an amazing, moving image that allows you to have a birds-eye view of Earth's processes.
Yet you won't be able to view every location on Earth. The Timelapse project only allows for a few pre-selected locations. Despite this, though, it's fascinating. You can watch the Amazon rainforest slowly being cut away by loggers and witness the Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska retreating at high speed. You can even see irrigation systems turning the sands of Saudi Arabia into a veritable agricultural breadbasket and the West Virginia Mountains being decapitated by the mining industry.
You can check out some of the amazing images for yourself by visiting Google's Timelapse site. There, you flip through the different areas of our planet, watching the world as almost 30 years pass it by.
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