Timelapse, Google’s most comprehensive picture of the Earth’s changing surface, is now getting its largest update with four additional years of imagery, petabytes of new data, and a sharper view of the Earth from 1984 to 2016.
Timelapse will now provide a sharper view of our planet, with truer colors and fewer distracting artifacts. Google said that for this latest update, it had access to more images from the past, with the help of the Landsat Global Archive Consolidation Program, and fresh images from two new satellites, Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2.
Moreover, Chris Herwig, Program Manager at Google Earth Engine, wrote, “We took the best of all those pixels to create 33 images of the entire planet, one for each 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.”
You can view the new annual mosaics in Google Earth’s historical imagery feature on the desktop from here.
