SAN RAMON, California – The Google Earth app adds a new video feature that draws from nearly four decades of satellite images to vividly show how climate change has affected glaciers, beaches, forests and other places around the world.
The tool unveiled Thursday will roll out in what is being billed as the biggest update to Google Earth in five years. Google says it carried out the complex project in collaboration with several government agencies, including NASA in the US and its European counterpart, in the hope that it will help a large audience make the sometimes abstract concept of climate change more tangible through the free Earth app . .
Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald believes the mission can be accomplished.
“This is great,” she told The Associated Press after previewing the new feature. “Getting people to understand the magnitude of climate change and the land use problem is so difficult because of the length of time and spatial scale. I wouldn’t be surprised if this one piece of software changes many people’s minds about the magnitude of people’s impact on the environment. “
This isn’t the first time that time-lapse satellite imagery has been used to show how parts of the world are changing before our very eyes as a result of a changing climate. Most scientists agree that climate change is caused by pollution caused mainly by humans.
But previous images focused mainly on melting glaciers and were not widely available in an already popular app like Google Earth, which can be downloaded on most of the more than 3 billion smartphones now in use worldwide.
Google promises that people can see a time-lapse presentation from just about anywhere they want to search. The feature also includes a storytelling mode that highlights 800 different places on the planet in both 2D and 3D formats. Those videos will also be available on Google’s YouTube video site, a service more widely used than the Earth app.
The feature was created from 24 million satellite images taken each year between 1984 and 2020 and provided by NASA, the US Geological Survey and the European Union, according to Google. The time lapse technology was created with the help of Carnegie Mellon University.
Google plans to update the time-lapse images at least once a year.