Google Earth updates: Timelapse from 1984 to 2016 to get four new layers of imagery

Google Earth, the Google application that lets you look at any corner of the earth as if viewed from a satellite has announced a major update. You will now be able to see a Timelapse of the earth from 1984 to 2016. Along with timelapse, Google Earth is also set to get four new layers of imagery and overall a sharper image quality.

Timelapse feature was introduced back in 2013, to let you see the earth’s changing surfaces. The new update will add four additional layers of imagery and petabytes of new data to get a sharper vision of our planet from 1984 to 2016.

“Leveraging the same techniques we used to improve Google Maps and Google Earth back in June , the new Timelapse reveals a sharper view of our planet, with truer colors and fewer distracting artifacts.” said The Keyword blog.

Some of the Timelapse GIFs shared on the site include Shirase Glacier in Antartica, O’Hare airport in Chicago, San Francisco Bridge and so on.

Google used the Google Earth Engine to sift through around three quadrillion pixels - 3 followed by 15 zeros - from over 5mn satellite images. Google has used imagery from the Landsat Global Archive Consolidation Program, along with two new satellites - Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2. Here, the growth of the city on the outskirts of Mumbai can be seen.

Google used the best pixels from these satellites to create 33 images of the entire planet with each image corresponding to a year. “We then encoded these new 3.95 terapixel global images into just over 25,000,000 overlapping multi-resolution video tiles, made interactively explorable by Carnegie Mellon CREATE Lab’s Time Machine library, a technology for creating and viewing zoomable and pannable timelapses over space and time,” said the blog.

These timelapses are available on the Earth Engine website  for you to check our how your neighbourhood evolved since 1984. Else you can check out this playlist which shows the timelapse from various regions across the planet.