'He said, 'You can observe a lot just by watching.'' 'I thought about one of the quotes attributed to Yogi Berra,' says Marc Levy, a political scientist at Columbia University's Earth Institute who specializes in issues of global health and development. Google Earth's time lapse videos of earth's landscape could make you think about the great baseball player Yogi Berra. Unfortunately, mostly in a negative way.Google Earth's time-lapse videos show see how the planet's surface has changed over time - like the evaporation of the Aral Sea (above). And we humans have played a significant role in that. But you won’t believe how much the world has changed in this relatively brief period. And 37 years is nothing compared to how long our planet has existed. A time lapse video of 37 images is rather short. But as a time lapse photographer, you might already have started calculating in your head: 37 years, one image per year, equals 37 images. Going back in time to 1984 sounds very impressive at first.

But, more importantly, you will get a visualisation of how we humans shape the world. Therefore, it is now possible to watch how landscapes change in natural ways. Google has promised to upload new data from now on, every year.

The whole point of this project is to document how our planet changes over time. So, try to remember this the second before you start complaining about the render times of your next time lapse project 😉 What does it show? It took thousands of Google’s “Google Cloud” computers and over two million hours to map these unbelievable 20 petabytes of footage together. All images had to be located in the right place, in the right scale and in the right perspective. After that, Google prepared these images in a way so they could be uploaded to the “Earth Engine”, where they got mapped onto a 3D model of our globe. You have Successfully Subscribed! How did they do it?įirstly, the programmes delivered over 24 million high-resolution satellite images from between 19.

Google timelapse earth