‘Time-Lapse Video’ Added To Google Earth To Depict Climate Change

The Google Earth app is adding a new video feature that took up almost four decades of satellite imagery to intensely illustrate how climate change has affected glaciers, beaches, forests, and other places around the world.

The tool revealed on Thursday is rolling out in what is being owed as the biggest update to Google Earth in five years. According to Google, it started the complex project in collaboration with several government agencies, including Nasa in the US and its European peer.

It hopes that it will facilitate a mass audience by grasping the abstract idea of climate change in more tangible terms through its free Earth app.

Natalie Mahowald, a climate scientist from Cornell University believes that goal may be achieved.

“This is incredible,” she stated after watching a preview of the new feature. “Making people understand the scope of the climate change and the land-use problem is not an easy task because of the long time and spatial scales. It wouldn’t be a surprise if this small software changes many people’s minds regarding the scale of the impact of humans on the environment.”

This is not for the first time that time-lapse satellite imagery has been used to determine how parts of the world are changing before us due to a changing climate. According to many scientists, climate change is being determined by pollution mainly produced by humans.

But previous images have mostly concentrated on melting glaciers and haven’t been extensively accessible on an already popular app like Google Earth, which can be downloaded on mostly over 3 billion smartphones now in use across the world. Google is hopeful that people will be allowed to see a time-lapse presentation of anywhere they want to search.

The feature also comprised of a storytelling mode that highlights 800 different places on the planet in both 2D and 3D formats.

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Those videos also will be accessible from Google’s YouTube video site, a service more widely used than the Earth app.