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Exclusive timelapse: See climate change, deforestation and urban sprawl unfold as Earth evolves over 30 years.
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Scooped by Beth Dichter |
Scoop.it!
Beth Dichter's insight:
How did this come to be? The Landsat program. “Two generations, eight satellites and millions of pictures later, the space agency, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has accumulated a stunning catalog of images that, when riffled through and stitched together, create a high-definition slide show of our rapidly changing Earth. TIME is proud to host the public unveiling of these images from orbit, which for the first time date all the way back to 1984.”
Google has taken these “choppy images” and upgraded them into stunning videos with incredible details (more information on this is at the website). TIME has also created a story that utilizes the videos and text to help understand the story they tell.
* Chapter 1 – Satellite Story
* Chapter 2 – Extreme Resources
* Chapter 3 – Climate Change
* Chapter 4 – Urban Explosion
It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and these moving images tell a story that is often hard to understand. If we are interested in learning more about how we have impacted our planet this is a great resource.
Spacecraft and telescopes are not built by people interested in what’s going on at home. Rockets fly in one direction: up. Telescopes point in one direction: out. Of all the cosmic bodies studied in the long history of astronomy and space travel, the one that got the least attention was the one that ought to matter most to us—Earth.
That changed when NASA created the Landsat program, a series of satellites that would perpetually orbit our planet, looking not out but down. Surveillance spacecraft had done that before, of course, but they paid attention only to military or tactical sites. Landsat was a notable exception, built not for spycraft but for public monitoring of how the human species was altering the surface of the planet. Two generations, eight satellites and millions of pictures later, the space agency, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has accumulated a stunning catalog of images that, when riffled through and stitched together, create a high-definition slide show of our rapidly changing Earth. TIME is proud to host the public unveiling of these images from orbit, which for the first time date all the way back to 1984.
Over here is Dubai, growing from sparse desert metropolis to modern, sprawling megalopolis. Over there are the central-pivot irrigation systems turning the sands of Saudi Arabia into an agricultural breadbasket — a surreal green-on-brown polka-dot pattern in the desert. Elsewhere is the bad news: the high-speed retreat of Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska; the West Virginia Mountains decapitated by the mining industry; the denuded forests of the Amazon, cut to stubble by loggers.
Incredible images showing not only deforestation, but increase in urban sprawl & vanishing glaciers.
Wow!