And of course, there’s the changes in the natural world such as meandering rivers, rising tides, shrinking glaciers, and dwindling forests, Bec Crew reports for ScienceAlert. There’s the creation of artificial islands off the coast of Dubai, for another. While anyone can pick their own coordinates to examine, Google’s engineers isolated some particularly striking ones-the development of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada’s Tar Sands, is one example. In the end, all that work and data crunching resulted in a much sharper and more detailed look at the way both nature and humans have reshaped the face of the planet over the last 30 years. The Google time-lapse images pack 3.95 trillion pixels into a single frame. The average high-definition TV image is made of about 300,000 individual points of light. In all of the images, there were plenty of those pixels to attend to. In some, cloud cover had to be scrubbed away in others missing pixels had to be filled in. The satellite images that Google’s engineers worked with were extremely high resolution, and in order to get the best pictures, they had to give some of them touch ups. Processing that much data, however, is easier said than done. “For this latest update, we had access to more images from the past, thanks to the Landsat Global Archive Consolidation Program, and fresh images from two new satellites, Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2.” “Using Google Earth Engine, we sifted through about three quadrillion pixels-that's 3 followed by 15 zeroes-from more than 5,000,000 satellite images,” Chris Herwig, Google Earth’s program manager, writes in a blog post. But those initial pictures were rough compared to the updated high-resolution imagery now used with the tool, giving people a much sharper look at the world as it changed, Peter Hess reports for Popular Science. Google first rolled out Timelapse in 2013, which allowed users to scroll back through satellite images to see what the world looked like at any point between 1984 and the present. Now, Google Earth's latest update to "Timelapse" gives viewers a glimpse into the past, allowing them to watch landscapes evolve from 1984 to 2016. A lot has changed in the past 32 years: average yearly temperatures increased, glacier have retreated and nearly three billion more people wander the planet’s surface.
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