Google Earth Timelapse update shows stunning images depicting 30 years of climate change

Google has announced an update to its Earth Timelapse feature after the tech giant added four additional years of imagery, petabytes of new data and a view of how climate change has impacted Earth from 1984 to 2016. The California-headquartered company teamed up with Time to offer more details and a compelling view of some scenic locations.

Timelapse – is a global zoomable video that lets users see how the Earth has changed over the years and shows changes from San Francisco and Oakland in California, to glacial movement in Antarctica, urban growth and development in Las Vegas, and forest gain and loss in the Amazon.

Google said that by using its Earth Engine it combined more than five million satellite images that were captured over the past three decades by five different satellites. A majority of the images are from Landsat, a joint US Geological Survey USGS/Nasa Earth programme that has observed Earth since the 1970s.

The latest Timelapse consists of 33 images – one for each year – which were made interactive by Carnegie Mellon University's Create Lab's Time Machine – a technology that is used for creating and viewing zoomable and pannable timelapses over space and time.

The internet giant first unveiled the Google Earth Timelapse feature – the most comprehensive picture of Earth's changing surface – in 2013. It worked with USGS, Nasa and Time to release more than a quarter-century of images of Earth taken from space. It offers users to view changes like the sprouting of Dubai's artificial Palm Island, the retreat of Alaska's Columbia Glacier and the urban growth in Las Vegas from 1984 to 2012.