It has long been possible to search for a specific address via Google Earth and view it from above using a satellite image.
But now the search service is expanding with 24 million satellite images, so you can see how a specific place has developed year by year from 1984 to now.
With the upgrade, Google will show how the globe has changed over the past 37 years.
– Climate change can be a little difficult to spot on a daily basis. But if you zoom out and see the development over time, you can very easily see how the globe is changing, says Jesper Vangkilde, communications manager at Google Denmark.
The images are shown on videos using the so-called timelapse technique, which shows the development year by year.
The images were taken by satellites in space and typically show a larger area.
So you should not expect to be able to see the development completely locally around, for example, a household.
– Where it really comes into its own are places where great changes have taken place.
– For example, the Berlin Wall that disappears, the Amazon jungle that shrinks, or glaciers that melt.
– But you can also see how, for example, the port of Copenhagen has expanded in recent decades, says Jesper Vangkilde.
The new tool will be available to everyone. According to Jesper Vangkilde, the hope is that researchers and teachers in particular will be able to make use of the new opportunities to illustrate developments on the planet.
It is a collaboration with, among others, the American space agency Nasa, the European space program Copernicus and the European Commission that has made the new service possible.
It takes huge amounts of computing power to store the satellite images, make them searchable and compile the images into timelapse videos.
But the communications manager assures that it happens in a CO2-neutral way.
– All work from Google’s side is climate neutral. Our data centers are matched one to one with renewable energy.
– So it does not hurt the globe that we have done this huge work, says Jesper Vangkilde and mentions that Google has, among other things, invested in five solar parks in Denmark.