Appeared service that shows how the Earth has changed over 30 years

Google and Time magazine have launched a new project that shows what changes our planet has undergone over the 30 years. With the support of NASA and the United States Geological Survey as well as using satellite images of over 25-year period an interactive map has been drawn up.

The service will not only show how the cities have grown over the past decade. But it will also show how artificial islands in Dubai appeared, how Las Vegas has increased, how Amazon forests were cut down and how a glacier in Alaska shifts.

According to experts, the map contains millions of satellite images collected as part of the joint work of NASA and United States Geological Survey. The overall project is known as Landsat. As part of this project, from the 1970s, satellites take pictures of our planet and subsequently all the images are archived in the tape drives of USGS.

In 2009, Google launched the project in digitization of the images collected. Using Google Earth Engine technology more than 2 million images have been revised in order to retain only ones of the best quality (no clouds, etc.) for each year since 1984. Subsequently, all images were converted into a single HTML5-animation that today anyone can see on Google.