Since the 1970s, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey have been amassing satellite images of every inch of our planet as part of the Landsat program. Over time, the images reveal a record of change: of cities expanding, lakes and forests disappearing, new islands emerging from the sea off the coast of rising Middle East metropolises like Dubai.
If you could thumb through these historic pictures as if in a flip book, they would show stunning change across the earth’s surface, in both our natural environments and our man-made ones. Now, the digital equivalent of that experience is possible – three decades of global change as GIF – in a project between NASA, the USGS, TIME, Google, and the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.
Landsat images taken between 1984 and 2012 have been converted into a seamless, navigable animation built from millions of satellite photos. As Google wrote on its blog: “We believe this is the most comprehensive picture of our changing planet ever made available to the public.”
Below are a few of the GIFs Google has created showing some of the most startling pockets of change:
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You can also zoom in to any spot on the planet – your hometown, the Amazon, your favourite Chinese mega-city – and watch the same three-decade timelapse unroll. Good luck getting anything done for the rest of the day.
This feature originally appeared in CityLab.
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