Final before and after. This is what Google Earth has to offer with its latest feature, discreetly called timelapse. You can thus observe the changes that have occurred in the planet over the past 35 years.

Always ‘before and after’ is great. This is especially the case on Google Earth. This program that introduces visualizing the earth from the sky has just introduced a new feature: Timelapse. As the name suggests, you can now observe all the changes that have occurred on our planet over the past 35 years, from 1984 to today.

An ideal opportunity to observe the positive changes of our planet as well as to observe the devastating effects of climate change. An excellent example: the melting of ice at the poles is especially surprising.

Take a step back

In fact, Timelapse’s main concern is realizing the impact of climate change on our planet. This is what Rebecca Morey, Director of Google Earth, said: For the edge: “This is a miniaturization. We need to take a step back. We can see better the condition of our common house.”

To set up such a feature, the software teams had to do a tremendous job gathering at least 20 million images. “To integrate Timelapse animation into Google Earth, we collected over 20 million satellite images taken between 1984 and 2000. In total, it took more than 2 million hours of processing on thousands of devices in Google Cloud to accommodate and convert 20 petabytes of satellite imagery. Into a mosaic of 4.4 terapixel video (that’s 4 followed by 12 zeros, which equates to 530,000 4K videos!) ”Explains Rebecca Morre, again to The Verge.

To achieve these results, Google has partnered with NASA, the European Commission and the European Space Agency. It was necessary to recover all necessary photos and data. If you are lazy to open Google Earth for testing timelapse, Google has put together a YouTube playlist of 290 videos to monitor changes in specific points of interest on the planet.

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