Google Earth application is adding a new feature that vividly shows how much climate change has affected forests, glaciers, beaches and other places around the world by drawing nearly four decades of satellite imagery. The tool was unveiled this Thursday and it is said that this update is being billed as the biggest update to the Google Earth application in the last five years. It was informed by Google that it managed the project in partnership with few government agencies, including NASA in the United States and its European counterpart. This partnership was organized in the hopes that it will help a mass audience understand the seriousness of climate change through its free Google Earth application.
Natalie Mahowald, a climate scientist from Cornell University, believes that the objective of this feature may be successful. “Trying to get people to understand the scope of the climate change and the land use problem is so difficult because of the long time and spatial scales. I would not be surprised if this one bit of software changes many people’s minds about the scale of the impact of humans on the environment”, she said to The Associated Press after watching a preview of the new feature.
This isn’t the first-time time-lapse satellite imagery has been used in a feature to demonstrate how parts of the world are changing before our eyes due to climate change. It is a well-known fact that climate change has been caused by pollution primarily produced by humans. There are earlier images however that focused mainly on melting glaciers to show the effect of climate change but it was not made available on popular apps such as Google Earth. Google is currently promising that people will be able to view a time lapse presentation of just about anywhere they want to search. It is also to be noted that this feature will include a storytelling mode that highlights about 800 places in 2D and 3D formats. The videos will be made available on Google’s YouTube video site, a service more widely used than the Google Earth app.
According to Google, the newly developed feature was created using 24 million satellite images taken every year from 1984 to 2020 and provided by NASA, the US Geological Survey and the European Union. The time lapse technology was created with the help of Carnegie Mellon University. Google also plans to update the time lapse imagery at least once a year.
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