dv said:
https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/
Timelapse
Timelapse is a global, zoomable video that lets you see how the Earth has changed over the past 32 years. It is made from 33 cloud-free annual mosaics, one for each year from 1984 to 2016, which are made interactively explorable by Carnegie Mellon University CREATE Lab’s Time Machine library, a technology for creating and viewing zoomable and pannable timelapses over space and time.
Using Earth Engine, we combined over 5 million satellite images acquired over the past three decades by 5 different satellites. The majority of the images come from Landsat, a joint USGS/NASA Earth observation program that has observed the Earth since the 1970s. For 2015 and 2016, we combined Landsat 8 imagery with imagery from Sentinel-2A, part of the European Commission and European Space Agency’s Copernicus Earth observation program.
Ta, I had to wait until I got to desktop to view it.
Miami – I’m quite sure that squares of roads don’t grow like that, they’ve used some weird intermediate frame technology.
But I do like the way the growth is in squares and rectangles, it makes the city much more liveable when traffic gets heavy.
Brisbane – I like the new runway and the extension at the river mouth into the ocean, now called Fisherman Island. The changes on North Stradbroke Island come as a shock. If that’s logging then it’s regrowing nicely. Could the sudden three lightenings of vegetation there be due to bushfires?
Schirase Glacier in Antarctica. This looks as if it’s grown 100 km longer since 1984.
Polarforshung Glacier in Antarctica. Three separate glaciers merge into one. I like the way that huge floating islands calve off and vanish.
San Francisco’s development. A bit like Brisbane, really. New docklands and foreshore redevelopment. What I want to know about, though, is the bridge duplication or replacement. The San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge has two main spans both? longer than the Golden Gate. News from 2009 “Officials warned Wednesday that the bridge linking the California cities of San Francisco and Oakland will likely remain closed Thursday morning, promising more delays for Bay Area commuters. That work is intended to dampen vibration on the structure. Vibration may have played a role in causing pieces of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge to fall Tuesday night from the span onto the roadway, resulting in its closure. The 73-year-old bridge spans the San Francisco Bay and carries an average 280,000 vehicles daily.” News from Friday, Dec 9th 2016, “New San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge opens at last to replace the one damaged in 1989 earthquake after 12 years of construction. The new eastern span (left) of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay bridge stands next to the older span (right).”
Lassen Volcanic National Park – what the heck is happening here? This is near where the Mt St Helens volcano erupted, but that’s not evident in the time lapse. What is evident is that the National Park as developed measles as several hundreds of small fields have been cleared in a weird pattern for no apparent reason.
Stumpy Point eastern USA. Massive changes in beach shape and tidal flats caused by ocean currents. Entirely natural.
Las Vegas. The city has increased in size by a factor of four. Lake Mead has fluctuated in size, ending smaller. Back in 1984, the visible part of Lake Mead and Las Vegas were about the same size. But the visible part is less than half of the whole.
Alberta Canada. I’d bet that what we’re seeing here is the rapid growth of mining operations, north of Fort McMurray. Unless I miss my guess, this scene contains the world’s largest dam at Syncrude, largest in the volume of material making up the dam wall. These dams are tailing dams from the mining operation. That’s right, Athabasca Oil Sands, oil sands are a great alternative to ordinary oil mining but the ability to process them easily has only recently been developed.
Columbia Glacier, Canada. Has shrunk 50 km, splitting up into two smaller glaciers. Interestingly, the two glaciers on either side haven’t shrunk at all.
Nuflo de Chavez, Bolivia. Massive agricultural development. The way square fields grow out radially from a central point, all at the same rate, is weird. The square fields have to be all the property of a single huge landholder. You can see the way that the river naturally grows and moves around as well.
Rondonia, Brazil. Also massive and almost equally weird agricultural development. Could this weirdness be created by the intermediate frame technology, like that for Miami? I bet it is.
Chuquicamata. Growth of two open cut mines. “The largest open pit copper mine in the world”.
Poopo Lake South America. This big lake fluctuates wildly in size, starting full but drying up completely twice. Reminds me of Australia’s large salt lakes.
Zwenkau, Germany. Again intermediate frame technology weirdness. Agriculturisation. In this case highlighted by the construction of sixteen or so large lakes.
Copenhagen and Malmo. More foreshore development. A big new curving bridge is under construction. What is it? “The Øresund Bridge is an approximately 16 km long road and rail link between Sweden and Denmark. Cable-stayed. Three quarters of the way along, it turns into a tunnel.
Toshka Lakes, southern Egypt. Fill and empty in the desert. Perhaps of more interest is the windblown sand movement in the left half of the image.
Dubai. No prizes for guessing what’s happening there on land as well as in the ocean. The foreshore in the image below isn’t finished, but is under construction. There are other developments there that I’m not at all familiar with, such as the crescent island 50 km offshore.
Saudi Arabia. Planned agricultural growth in the middle of the bare desert. Why there?
Aral Sea. No prizes for guessing what’s happening there, but it’s interesting to see how the far north seems unaffected, an all that is left is a narrow lagoon along the western shore. Below is a satellite image from 2009. Shouldn’t there be rivers flowing into this sea? I don’t see them.
Dead Sea. What’s happening to the south here? Fish farming on a massive scale, no. Salt production. Not much change in lake level.
Tibetan Plateau. Natural lakes fluctuating in size with the seasons. Getting bigger.
Chongquing, China. New city. Growing faster than Las Vegas. Nothing there in 1986.
Dalian, China. On the coast near Korea. More massive development. Rivalling Dubai.
+ one more, a solar farm in China. A 20 km across collection of solar cells. First appearing after 2010.
