SEE IT: New Google Earth tool shows time-lapse climate change
A major barrier to imparting the urgency of climate change and its long-term impact is the difficulty of relating it to everyday life.
But a new Google Earth tool unveiled Thursday could help change that.
It’s a time-lapse feature that shows the effects of climate change, very visually, just about anywhere in the world — from encroaching deserts, to rising sea levels, to disappearing glaciers — over decades.
“Timelapse is a global, zoomable video that shows how our planet has changed since 1984,” Google said in a statement accompanying the feature. “Google Earth users can now explore the imagery on the 3D globe, giving a whole new perspective to planetary change.”
The tool compiles 24 million satellite photos from the past 37 years into an “interactive 4D experience,” wrote Google Earth director Rebecca Moore in a company blog post Thursday referring to the 3D images, plus time. “Now anyone can watch time unfold and witness nearly four decades of planetary change.”
The search and internet giant said it’s the biggest update to Google Earth since 2017. Most of the images come from a joint U.S. Geological Survey/NASA Earth observation program that dates back to the 1970s. In 2015 Google added imagery from the European Union and European Space Agency’s Copernicus Earth observation program to the mix, the statement said.
Users can home in on any location, even their hometown, by typing its name into the search bar, as CNN noted, be it a landmark or their childhood haunts. Clouds and shadows have been stripped out.
The hope is that it will help a mass audience grasp the sometimes abstract concept of climate change in more tangible terms. The tool is debuting just as major news outlets around the world change their terminology to label the issue as a climate emergency, rather than climate change, to reflect the reality of the crisis.
‘Words matter’: Numerous news outlets to use ‘climate emergency’ instead of ‘climate change’
“This is amazing,” Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald told The Associated Press after watching a preview of the new feature. “Trying to get people to understand the scope of the climate change and the land use problem is so difficult because of the long time and spatial scales. I would not be surprised if this one bit of software changes many people’s minds about the scale of the impact of humans on the environment.”
With News Wire Services
