32 years, this is the span where you can see the biggest change in Earth's time on the Google map timeline.
Three years ago, Google launched this feature for the first time. Users at that time could use this timeline function to see changes in various regions on the earth from 1984 to 2012. Today, the map adds a new change to the Earth four years after 2012.
Because the country with the biggest changes in the past 32 years may be China, I randomly found a few domestic cities and tried it. It was very interesting:
The pictures on these maps were generated using high-definition pictures sent back by Sentinel 2 and Landsat 8 satellites combined with new image processing technology.
Landsat 8 was launched into orbit in 2013. It is a satellite equipped with the latest sensors in the USGS Landsat program, with better performance than previous versions. The photos it captures can present more details and have more realistic colors. Compared to Landsat 7, it takes twice as many photos as the former.
When the earth is cloudy, the photos taken by satellite images are not clear. In order to make the images in the timeline better present, Google uses its satellite image processing operation platform Google Maps Engine to filter out pixels photos from 5 million satellite images, and selects the highest-quality photos from these photos every year to form 33 pictures of world map .
Then encode these pictures into dynamic image blocks. This technology comes from Carnegie Mellon CREATE labs, which is used to create and view pictures of zoomable space and time.
You can view this global map spanning 32 years on Google Maps. You can also view it on their partner media TIME website, click "EXPLORE THE WORLD" in the lower right corner of the map, and it can directly jump to the location where you want to view the area.
title picture Pixabay
