How Earth has changed in 30 years timelapse

Another mind-blowing timelapse project powered by Google in collaboration with Time magazine. Check out the amazing satellite images, taken from space from 1984 to 2012.

Google and Time have created amazing timelapse of the Earth, featuring images taken from space over a period of almost three decades. The results, as you might presume are simply incredible. The astonishing number of images were taken by eight satellites called Landsats, built by NASA strictly for public monitoring of how we humans are altering the planet. Before Landsat, satellites and surveillance aircrafts were built mainly for spying and military purposes. Thirty years and millions of images later, NASA and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) have acquired and stitched this endless amount of pictures together, into a mighty fine high-definition catalog of our beloved and increasingly changing Earth.

Let's take a look as some amazing changes that took place from the year 1984 to 2012 at some of the places with the most impact, caused more or less either directly or indirectly by actions of the human specie.

Dubai was once just a little more than a fishing village, this Middle Eastern megacity has blown up in recent years, even extending onto new land in the Persian Gulf.

Shanghai of China was always a major city, but over the past 30 years it has spread wildly across the Yangtze River Delta, building skyscrapers over what were once farming villages.

Since 1994, the Amazon rainforest lost almost 400,000 square kilometers (155,000 square miles) of its cover, due to deforestation caused mainly by cattle pasture, the valuable hardwood, housing space and farming space.

Columbia Glacier, a long tongue of ice in Alaska's Prince William Sound is one of the fastest-moving glaciers in the world as a consequence of rapid warming in the far north.



Lake Urmia in Iran, is the largest lake in the Middle East, this saline body of water has been drying up over the past few decades because of drought and exaggerated construction.

Go check the original Time and Google website as well, the animated timelapses really are amazing and worth a watch. They will probably make you think where we were and where we are going in the near and distant future.