TimelapseLast week, Google released an update to an app they originally put out in 2013 called Timel

TimelapseLast week, Google released an update to an app they originally put out in 2013 called Timelapse. The US Geological Survey’s Landsat program has been collecting orbital images of the planet Earth for decades, producing the longest running series of photos of Earth’s surface ever created. Landsat satellites have looked down on the planet as humans have fundamentally reshaped the landscape, and the Google Timelapse app is built to share that database.In conjunction with computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, the programmers built up 33 images that are cloud-free mosaics covering the entire planet’s surface every year. Assembling these required sorting through millions of Landsat (and for 2015 images from the ESA Sentinel satellite program) to find frames that were cloud-free and covered the full planet. They then stitched them together and built an app that works like Google Earth – you can scroll to any place on Earth and watch that area evolve from 1984 to 2016.This gif shows the development of the community of Fort McMurray, Canada, which grew massively over this time due to the development of bituminous sands as a resource that could be converted into gasoline. In 2016 this area was struck by a massive wildfire, with damage from that not yet caught in the frame.Scroll through some of their selected images and you can watch the response to the 2004 and 2011 tsunami waves (the seashore changes are pretty remarkable), rapid growth of some cities, evacuations of others.-JBBSelected gifs:http://bit.ly/2gGwxJDTime Magazine Feature:http://time.com/timelapse2016/Youtube highlightshttp://bit.ly/2gT5FJ9 -- source link

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