The data-crunching developers at Google are renowned for taking vast amounts of information and processing it into fascinating snapshots of our world. Now the company has teamed up with several partners to harness the data culled from Google Earth and NASA satellites to produce a virtual time machine that looks at how the planet has developed over time.
Through a partnership with NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Google has released an online database of time-lapse images that show almost 30 years of satellite imagery of Earth’s surface undergoing various changes. Those images can also be viewed via Time magazine’s new Timelapse project, a site that aggregates and contextualizes the imagery via an interactive presentation. To make the visualizations clear and consistent, Google began working with the USGS back in 2009 and used Google Earth Engine to parse through the roughly 2 million images that represent about 900 terabytes of data. Selecting the images with the best resolutions, as well as picking out the views free of cloud cover, the team assembled the database that spans from 1984 to 2012. The original satellite imagery was facilitated by a project known as Landsat, a series of satellites that have been orbiting the Earth since 1972.
