Have you seen Google's time lapse pictures of Earth yet? Released in May as part of a collaboration with Time magazine, the time lapses use NASA and U.S. Geological Survey Landsat satellite imagery to show changes in the planet from 1984 to 2012. In the month they've been public, the images have been ricocheting around the Internet at warp speed. Google hopes they will ultimately make as big a change in how we perceive our planet as the famous "Blue Marble" picture of Earth taken from the Apollo spacecraft.
The images do show incredible changes to the natural world. Receding glaciers, deforestation of the Amazon - it's all here in crystal-clear detail. But the pictures also show the amazing growth of cities as diverse as Las Vegas and Dubai. Alabama cities are here, too, and the search website makes it easy to locate Birmingham, Mobile, Montgomery, Huntsville or any other Alabama city and watch it grow.
Here is Rebecca Moore, engineering manager of Google Earth Engine & Earth Outreach, explaining how the time lapses were created. "We started working with the USGS in 2009 to make this historic archive of earth imagery available online. Using Google Earth Engine technology, we sifted through 2,068,467 images--a total of 909 terabytes of data--to find the highest-quality pixels (e.g., those without clouds), for every year since 1984 and for every spot on Earth. We then compiled these into enormous planetary images, 1.78 terapixels each, one for each year."
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