Don’t believe me? Try Google’s Timelapse on either your PC or smartphone — you might end up being a bit convinced that nature is surely changing and not in a positive manner. Google’s Timelapse, released in 2013, is an interactive feature which creates imagery of our world over a period of time and lets you scroll through the gallery — captured between 1984 and 2016. Using 5 million satellite images from five different satellites acquired over a period of 32 years and then converted to 33 cloud-free annual mosaic shots, this tool will help you see how the world has changed in the past 32 years. “The majority of images come from Landsat, a joint USGS/NASA Earth observation program that has observed the Earth since the 1970s. For 2015 and 2016, we combined Landsat 8 imagery with imagery from Sentinel-2A, part of the European Commission and European Space Agency’s Copernicus Earth observation program,” Google stated in a blog post.
The Environmental Damage
Below is a Timelapse for the Aral Sea. You can use the tool yourself to find other areas as well can access their YouTube playlist where they’ve made a compilation of Timelapse videos. Although Timelapse has been available for the past three years, it’s their recent November 29 update which makes their product much better than it was. Urban areas around the globe will show a dramatic change over this period of time, but that’s very natural given the shift of population from rural to more developed areas and overall development of science and technology, enabling us to make things bigger and better. The company used the same technology they used in Google Maps and Google Earth in the respective apps’ June 2016 update. This gave the new Timelapse enhanced features such as more natural colours, sharper images and fewer distractions during the slideshow. If you decide to venture beyond the urban areas and into scarcely populated areas which have more of nature than human in them, you’ll find the drastic effects of our lifestyle on the environment over a period of time. This article isn’t intended to discredit our amazing evolution into what we are today and all that we’ve built — there are plenty of beautiful Timelapse to enjoy — but this tool can as well be used by anyone to judge the environmental damage our world is facing currently. The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.
