Google Earth Teams Up with NASA and Others to Form a Timelapse Feature Showing How Earth Is Being Affected by Climate Change

Earth is different than what it used be 10 to 20 years ago. Though we have accomplished many milestones in these past years one thing we have neglected is the climate change that is happening around us.

In Southwestern Greenland, warmer Atlantic waters and air temperatures are accelerating ice melt. Tree loss in Brazil in 2020 surged by a quarter over the prior year. Solar farms are rising in China. Excessive Increase in temperatures in many countries while drop of temperatures in the colder regions is also observed. The climate is changing at a very fast rate and though we realize all this we avoid this truth at all cost.

In order to make people understand that what the Earth is going though and bring people to awareness Google Earth has partnered with NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, and Carnegie Mellon University’s to create time-lapse images of the planet’s surface—24 million satellite photos taken over 37 years.


Timelapse is the name of this new feature that Google Earth has rolled out widely. The company has claimed it to be the largest video on the planet requiring 2 million hours to process in cloud computers, and the equivalent of 530,000 high-resolution videos. The tool stitches together nearly 50 years of imagery from the U.S.'s Landsat program, which is run by NASA and the USGS. When these images are combined together the images from complementary European Sentinel-2 satellites, Landsat provides the equivalent of complete coverage of the Earth's surface every two days. Google Earth is expected to update Time lapse about once a year.

With these images together they are trying to form a photographic evidence of how the earth has changed over the years with shorelines creeping in. Cities blossom. Trees fall. Water reservoirs shrink. Glaciers melt and fracture in order to make people realize that affects have taken place slowly and gradually and such affects are increasing every day and therefore we have no time to ignore this now.

The 24 million images had to be processed in order to remove clouds or other obstructions and then the images are combined together to form the final product.

We hope people realize that climate change is a huge factor that will be affecting the coming generations immensely and therefore we need to change our ways of living in order to save our mother earth from deteriorating at such a fast pace.



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