#EARTHTIME CHAPTER 1 VIDEO UPDATE#
#EARTHTIME CHAPTER 1 VIDEO UPGRADE#
#EARTHTIME CHAPTER 1 VIDEO SERIES#
#EARTHTIME CHAPTER 1 VIDEO TV#

It takes a certain amount of courage to look at the videos, but once you start, it’s impossible to look away.Ĭhapter 1: Satellite Story | By Jeffrey Kluger These Timelapse pictures tell the pretty and not-so-pretty story of a finite planet and how its residents are treating it - razing even as we build, destroying even as we preserve. The Landsat images, by contrast, weigh in at 1.8 trillion pixels per frame, the equivalent of 900,000 high-def TVs assembled into a single mosaic.

#EARTHTIME CHAPTER 1 VIDEO TV#

Consider: a standard TV image uses about one-third of a million pixels per frame, while a high-definition image uses 2 million.

The images are striking not just because of their vast sweep of geography and time but also because of their staggering detail. With the help of massive amounts of computer muscle, they have scrubbed away cloud cover, filled in missing pixels, digitally stitched puzzle-piece pictures together, until the growing, thriving, sometimes dying planet is revealed in all its dynamic churn.

#EARTHTIME CHAPTER 1 VIDEO UPGRADE#

It took the folks at Google to upgrade these choppy visual sequences from crude flip-book quality to true video footage. Elsewhere is the bad news: the high-speed retreat of Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska the West Virginia Mountains decapitated by the mining industry the denuded forests of the Amazon, cut to stubble by loggers. Over there are the central-pivot irrigation systems turning the sands of Saudi Arabia into an agricultural breadbasket - a surreal green-on-brown polka-dot pattern in the desert. Over here is Dubai, growing from sparse desert metropolis to modern, sprawling megalopolis. TIME is proud to host the public unveiling of these images from orbit, which for the first time date all the way back to 1984. Geological Survey (USGS), has accumulated a stunning catalog of images that, when riffled through and stitched together, create a high-definition slide show of our rapidly changing Earth. Two generations, eight satellites and millions of pictures later, the space agency, along with the U.S.

Landsat was a notable exception, built not for spycraft but for public monitoring of how the human species was altering the surface of the planet. Surveillance spacecraft had done that before, of course, but they paid attention only to military or tactical sites.

#EARTHTIME CHAPTER 1 VIDEO SERIES#

That changed when NASA created the Landsat program, a series of satellites that would perpetually orbit our planet, looking not out but down. Of all the cosmic bodies studied in the long history of astronomy and space travel, the one that got the least attention was the one that ought to matter most to us-Earth. Spacecraft and telescopes are not built by people interested in what’s going on at home.

#EARTHTIME CHAPTER 1 VIDEO UPDATE#

29, 2016, Google released a major update expanding the data from 2012 to 2016. The largest lake in the Middle East, this saline body of water has been drying up over the past few decades because of drought and overconstruction.Įditors note:On Nov. This long tongue of ice in Alaska's Prince William Sound is one of the fastest-moving glaciers in the world thanks to rapid warming in the far north. But does Wyoming coal have a future in a climate-conscious world? The Powder River Basin produces more than 40% of America's coal, and the land bears the scars of all that mining. As the Arctic warms, will glaciers become a thing of the past?

Is the economic benefit worth the environmental cost?Ī warming climate has helped cause this Alaskan glacier to retreat by nearly 2 miles over the past few decades. The once quiet forests of northeastern Alberta have been transformed by the boom in unconventional oil.

The financial capital of China was always a major city, but over the past 30 years it has metastasized across the Yangtze River Delta, building skyscrapers over what were once farming villages. Once little more than a fishing village, this Middle Eastern megacity has blown up in recent years, even extending onto new land in the Persian Gulf. The city has exploded over the past few decades, sprawling into the desert-even as a growing population and worsening drought shrink nearby Lake Mead.

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