![]() I was, however, able to see a city in central Mexico go from a condensed urban area surrounded by arid hills to a textbook example of suburban sprawl-those same hills went from brown and green to white and gray as more and more concrete buildings went up, intersected by paved streets where before there had been none. The view is high-level I was hoping to zoom in on the block where I grew up and see it transform from empty fields to a suburban neighborhood, but couldn’t get nearly close enough. In Google’s blog post announcing the update, Rebecca Moore, director of Google Earth, writes that creating the new feature “took more than two million processing hours across thousands of machines in Google Cloud to compile 20 petabytes of satellite imagery into a single 4.4 terapixel-sized video mosaic.” That’s the equivalent, she adds, of 530,000 videos in 4K resolution. ![]() The newest version is now part of the Google Earth app and offers the option to view any spot on Earth in 3D, as well as 800 videos of areas all over the world that are free to download. Timelapse first launched in 2D for Google Earth Engine in 2013, and has been updated every few years since then, with the last major update before this one occurring in 2016. ![]() True to its name, the feature is essentially a timelapse video of the whole planet, compiled over the course of almost four decades and requiring some pretty impressive technology. That’s part of the update Google Earth released last week to a program called Timelapse. ![]() Yes, that’s right: 24 million images taken over 37 years, all put together for your viewing pleasure. Satellites are doing all kinds of amazing new things lately, from beaming high-speed internet to remote areas to capturing high-resolution images through clouds to taking 24 million images of every part of the Earth to show how it’s changed over the last 37 years.
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