Google Earth Shows 30 Years of Climate Change

Satellites have revolutionized the way we see the world. Since the first satellite image of earth was taken in 1959, they’ve captured a world reshaped by humans.

Cities have risen, lakes have dried out, ice shelves have disappeared and the future of energy has begun popping up in deserts and fields around the world. Human ingenuity put the satellites into orbit hundreds of miles above the earth to chronicle these changes. And now human ingenuity has strung together decades of images to crystalize what those changes look like in every corner of the globe.

Google has been collecting a database of imagery from the Landsat and Sentinel satellite systems that spans 1984 until the present. It’s part of a petabyte-scale database from our eyes in the sky (for reference, you’d need 31,250 iPhone 7s — the basic 32 gigabyte version — to store a single petabyte of data). Using their Earth Engine system, anyone with an internet connection can see those changes. Here are some of the starkest and most hopeful timelapses of our planet.

Read Brian Kahn’s story on ClimateCentral - “Google Earth Shows 30 Years of Climate Change.”