We recently mentioned that we had noted that the disputed islands in the South China sea had not received any satellite imagery updates for over a year. It is an area of particular interest as China is building a number of artificial islands there as we have previously shown you.
We have noticed that in the most recent imagery update, Google has finally added an image of one of the artificial islands, Fiery Cross Reef, allowing us to see how much progress has been made. There are actually two new images, one from January 8th, 2016 and one from May 1st, 2016.
Here is an animation of the artificial island being built:
You can adjust the speed of the animation by dragging the slider.
The imagery is quite beautiful and worth seeing in higher resolution than our animations allow, so we made it into a video. It was remarkably easy to do. We first created this Google Earth Tour
then used Google Earth Pro’s built in Movie Maker to record the tour. We then uploaded the file to YouTube. You can play it full screen and in high resolution. There is no sound.