The team at Google Earth collaborated with the experts at Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab, who are credited with working on the software behind the amazing timelapse. Once the data was available, the two entities collaborated yet again to make sense of what exactly they were looking at. On closer inspection, five themes emerged, namely –
- Forest Change
- Urban Growth
- Warming Temperatures
- Sources of Energy
- Fragile Beauty
But how was all this possible?
The answer is crazier, every time we read it, and we thought we should share this with you, the reader.
Making a planet-sized timelapse video required a significant amount of what is called “pixel crunching” in Earth Engine, Google’s cloud platform for geospatial analysis. To add animated Timelapse imagery to Google Earth, the company gathered more than 24 million satellite images from 1984 to 2020, representing quadrillions of pixels. It 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 of 530,000 videos in 4K resolution!
