Google has provided these incredible animated GIFs illustrating the Earth’s landscape changes over the decades for Time‘s Timelapse project.
The images show deforestation in the Amazon of Brazil, glaciers retreating in Alaska, and lakes drying up in Las Vegas sprawls as well as other landscapes.
Check out more illustrations below…
Google announced today on the Google Earth Google+ page that it is launching a major update to the iOS, Android, and desktop Google Earth apps. Google is updating the tour guide and 3D imagery features it launched in October with Google Earth 7, and it announced the addition of 100,000 new tours of “popular sites, cities and places across 200 countries.” It is also adding as over 1 million user-generated Panoramio photos:
The new, richer tours combine 3D flyovers, Wikipedia snippets and – for the first time – place highlight and more than 1 million user-generated Panoramio photos in order to create an immersive and educational exploration of your favorite places. Each tour ends with a selection of photo thumbnails which were selected from Panoramio as the best representation of a given place. Clicking on one of the thumbnails enables a full screen photo experience. Read more
New high resolution 45º, aerial and satellite imagery for over 160 locations worldwide: goo.gl/FblMV http://t.co/7AifNOda
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Google Maps (@googlemaps) November 16, 2012As noted on the Google Maps blog, Google continues to update maps with new aerial, satellite, and 45-degree imagery for many cities in the U.S. and abroad. Google’s most recent addition to maps is a new collection of 45-degree imagery for 60 new cities—40 in the U.S. and 20 internationally— in places like Switzerland and Luxembourg. That brings the total number of cities with updated aerial and satellite imagery in Maps and Google Earth up to 164 cities in 108 countries. Google walked through a few of the recent updates, such as the Space Needle in Seattle and Bridges in the Sky art installation in Austria, but also provided a full list of cities with new high resolution imagery (below): Read more
On the Lat-Long Blog today, Google announced it is making new features available in the latest version of Google Earth including the tour guide and 3D imagery it rolled out to the mobile apps in July. Google Earth 7 for the desktop now includes “comprehensive and accurate tours of more than 11,000 popular sites around the world, including our growing list of cities where new 3D imagery is available.” Google is also rolling out more accurate 3D imagery for new areas:
In addition, Google Earth 7 now includes the comprehensive, accurate 3D imagery we’ve already made available on Android and iOS for Boulder, Boston, Charlotte, Denver, Lawrence, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Portland, San Antonio, San Diego, Santa Cruz, Seattle, Tampa, Tucson, Rome and the San Francisco Bay Area (including the Peninsula and East Bay). And today, we’re adding more 3D imagery for a handful of metropolitan regions including Avignon, France; Austin, Texas; Munich, Germany; Phoenix, Arizona; and Mannheim, Germany.
You can download Google Earth 7 here. Read more
Sustrans, a British charity promoting sustainable transport, just announced that it partnered with Google to bring cycling routes to United Kingdom-based Google Maps users.
Greener-minded Americans are quite familiar with the biking icon and its bevy of alternative transit routes, but now U.K. fans of the popular mapping app can plan their cycling trips, navigate bike lanes, and time routes on both smartphones and computers. For those unfamiliar, Google Maps offers worldwide mapping technology, directions and local business information to mobile and desktop users by way of satellite and street-level imagery and user-contributed content.
“We know how popular cycling is in London and the rest of the UK, especially ahead of a busy summer, which is why we are thrilled to bring cycling directions to Google Maps. Thanks to Sustrans, we now have thousands of miles of trails and routes, as well as bike lanes and recommended streets for cities across the country,” said Google UK Geospatial Technologist Ed Parsons.
“We’ll continue to add new trail information and urge commuters to swap their car for a bike as they can now find a convenient route that makes use of dedicated bike tracks and avoid hills whenever possible, Parsons added.
The new feature goes live today, and Sustrans is celebrating the launch with its own video, called “Lucy’s Cycling Treasure Hunt” (above).
The press release is below.
The Google Crisis Response team just issued a new crisis map for the 2012 U.S. wildfire season.
Major media outlets are reporting on the massive wildfires wreaking havoc in Colorado and Utah, and Google is working to provide related information to those affected by way of maps that feature fire perimeters cropped from the U.S. Geological Survey, Red Cross, and satellite imagery by DigitalGlobe.
“Use the checkboxes along the right-hand panel to turn on and off the layers of information, and the ‘Share’ button at the top of the map to grab the URL or embed code. Note that both the URL and the embed code will automatically restore your current view of the map, including the set of layers that you have turned on,” wrote Googler Pete Giencke on the Google Lat Long Blog, while explaining how to navigate the crisis map.
