Google, Time launch Timelapse showing planetary changes over 25 years

Google, Time Magazine, NASA and the US Geological Survey (USGS) have teamed up to create a portal showing how much the planet has changed over the past 25 years.

The interactive timelapse portal uses photos from NASA’s Landsat programme collected over the past quarter of a century and highlights the impact humankind has had on places such as Dubai, the Amazon, Las Vegas and the Columbia Glacier.

Each section serves up a little information on the area, with a slider covering the time period and allows you to zoom in and out of them.

According to Rebecca Moore, engineering manager, Google Earth Engine & Earth Outreach, the Landsat satellites “have been observing earth from space since the 1970s—with all of the images sent back to Earth and archived on USGS tape drives”.

The reason the photos are of a decent quality is because Google spent a significant amount of time upgrading the original USGS images. The internet giant, says Time’s Jeffrey Kruger, “scrubbed away cloud cover, filled in missing pixels, digitally stitched puzzle-piece pictures together, until the growing, thriving, sometimes dying planet is revealed in all its dynamic churn”.

Google’s been working with the USGS since 2009 to make this imagery available online. In fact, this isn’t the first time it’s made these type of photographs available. Last year it made images from 1999 to 2011 available on Google Earth.

This latest project saw Google sifting through 2 068 467 images (909 terabytes of data) for the best images.

“As the final step, we worked with the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, recipients of a Google Focused Research Award, to convert these annual Earth images into a seamless, browsable HTML5 animation,” adds Moore.