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The amazing things about Google Earth


timelapse

Some amazing “before and after” images in Google Earth

One of my favorite features in Google Earth is the historical imagery. Being able to go back in time and see how a location looked years earlier is very cool.  With that in mind, the folks at Mashable put together a list of “11 shocking Google Earth Before-and-After Photos“.

haiti

The majority of what they show are things we’ve highlighted over the years: the post-earthquake changes in Haiti, the northeast United States after Hurricane Sandy, post-earthquake imagery in Japan, images after the 2011 tornado in Joplin, images after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, and a handful of other examples.

It really helps to show the power of Google Earth, and just how striking the historical imagery can be.  You can find similar visualizations using Google’s Timelapse project, and then check out this full article for yourself on Mashable.

Exploring historical imagery with Google Timelapse

The historical imagery feature of Google Earth is an amazing tool, allowing you to browse imagery from a handful of different years for any given location on earth.  Google has recently been working on a project with the USGS, NASA and TIME called Timelapse, and they’ve released it as a browser-based interactive timeline of imagery for selected locations on earth.

timelapse

The process for developing this is stunning.  From the Google Lat Long Blog:

We started working with the USGS in 2009 to make this historic archive of earth imagery available online. Using Google Earth Engine technology, we sifted through 2,068,467 images—a total of 909 terabytes of data—to find the highest-quality pixels (e.g., those without clouds), for every year since 1984 and for every spot on Earth. We then compiled these into enormous planetary images, 1.78 terapixels each, one for each year.

They’ve also created a handful of animated GIFs to show some of the timelapses, such as this one that features the Columbia Glacier Retreat from 1984-2011:

Columbia Glacier Retreat

Additional animated GIFs can be found on their Google+ page.

You can go check it all out for yourself on the Google Timelapse page, or read more about it on TIME’s website or on the Google Lat Long Blog.