A new video feature on Google Earth app, named Timelapse, can show four decades worth of satellite imagery, proving how the climate change has affected the planet. On Thursday, the new feature became Google Earth’s most significant update in the past five years. With this new feature of the app the entire nature is observed in vivid details changing. For example, it’s possible to see the Cape Cod coast slowly shifting south, agriculture growth in the middle of a desert in Al Jowf, Saudi Arabia, and the development of Songdo beach, a man-made beach in Busan, South Korea. According to Google, the tool was a complex project, a collaborative piece with several government agencies worldwide, including NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the European Union, getting its information from 24 million satellite images taken every year from 1984 to 2020. Carnegie Mellon University was also participating on the project which helped develop the technology behind Timelapse. It took two million processing hours across thousands of machines in Google Cloud for this project. “Visual evidence can cut to the core of the debate in a way that words cannot and communicate complex issues to everyone,” said Rebecca Moore, a director of Google Earth. “Timelapse in Google Earth is about zooming out to assess the health and well-being of our only home, and is a tool that can educate and inspire action,” she added
.To explore Timelapse in Google Earth, users can type any location into the search bar to see it in motion, whether it’s a landmark or the neighborhood in which they grew up.The Google Earth app can be found on Google Play.
