Monday - Google Earth is celebrating the 40 years of NASA’s Landsat satellites that have been constantly circling and collecting data on the Earth’s surface by making these images available for public access on Google Earth. Over the course of 40 years, these photos taken by Landsat satellites, which have been orbiting around the globe every 16 days since July of 1972, are now available in the form of timelapse video. Google, who endeavored this sets of helpful information accessible to the public, has been constantly working with U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and Carnegie Mellon University to launch the image collection on an online platform.
Imagine seeing our planet as it changes over time – whether it might be of natural cause or by man-made works. Imagine you can travel through time as you see each change wearing and tearing out Earth’s face every other year. In a the official blog of Google, it says “With them you can travel through time, from 1999-2011, to see the transformation of our planet — whether it’s deforestation in the Amazon, urban growth in Las Vegas or the difference in snow coverage between the seasons.” That’s the kind of feeling that you get by watching the film made by Google Earth and at the same time, that’s the kind of endeavor Google Earth wants to share to the world – a sense of time and change.
So far, it is the longest-running record of the Earth’s surface landscape to date. The process of capturing these images are repeated over and over again, from pole to pole, to record and collect data each time. This process allows scientist to create a layer of mosaic-like topography of the same area over a period of time and see how Earth is constantly changing.
Over the four decades of constant recordings, Google believes this is the largest video frames ever created on the entire web. Google relates the whole thing to an analogy, “If you could see the entire video at full resolution, a single frame would be 1.78 terapixels which is 18 football fields’ worth of computer screens laid side-by-side.”
Want to know more how much our world have changed? Watch the video below and see our world unfolding in different layers of changes!
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