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Landsat Satellite Images of Climate Change, via Google Earth Engine. TIME and Space By Jeffrey Kluger. Editors note: On Nov. Google released a major update expanding the data from 2. Read about the update here. Spacecraft and telescopes are not built by people interested in what’s going on at home. Rockets fly in one direction: up.
Telescopes point in one direction: out. 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. That changed when NASA created the Landsat program, a series of satellites that would perpetually orbit our planet, looking not out but down. Surveillance spacecraft had done that before, of course, but they paid attention only to military or tactical sites. 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. Two generations, eight satellites and millions of pictures later, the space agency, along with the U.
S. 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. TIME is proud to host the public unveiling of these images from orbit, which for the first time date all the way back to 1. Over here is Dubai, growing from sparse desert metropolis to modern, sprawling megalopolis. 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. 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. It took the folks at Google to upgrade these choppy visual sequences from crude flip- book quality to true video footage. 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.
The images are striking not just because of their vast sweep of geography and time but also because of their staggering detail. Consider: a standard TV image uses about one- third of a million pixels per frame, while a high- definition image uses 2 million. The Landsat images, by contrast, weigh in at 1. TVs assembled into a single mosaic.
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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. It takes a certain amount of courage to look at the videos, but once you start, it’s impossible to look away. Chapter 1: Satellite Story By Jeffrey Kluger. It’s a safe bet that few people who have grown up in the Google era have ever heard of Stewart Udall. Watch Vino Veritas Online on this page. A U. S. Representative of Arizona’s 2nd Congressional District from 1. Udall left the House to become Interior Secretary under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
- TIME and Space By Jeffrey Kluger. Editors note:On Nov. 29, 2016, Google released a major update expanding the data from 2012 to 2016. Read about the update here.
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That was pretty much it for his time in the public eye — not exactly an icon of the wired generation, right? But in 1. 96. 6, Udall and his staff had an idea. Watch The Terminator 4Shared.
For all the attention the then budding space program was devoting to other planets, our own was being overlooked. If humanity wanted to protect its threatened natural resources, we first had to be able to keep an eye on them. That meant a satellite or, preferably, multiple satellites that could maintain a steady downward gaze, tracking habitat destruction, urbanization, industrial sprawl and more.
Udall’s concern gave rise to Project EROS (Earth Resources Observation Satellites), later renamed Landsat. For all the bad and misguided ideas that came out of the 1. Since NASA launched the first Landsat satellite in 1. Seven other satellites followed the first into orbit over the years, sometimes replacing ones that had reached the end of their operational life, sometimes joining ones still in operation. The most recent member of the fleet, Landsat 8, went aloft in February.
At an altitude of 4. Earth every 8. 4. Keep that up for 4.
In 2. 00. 8 the U. S. government ruled that those pictures, which had been available for sale to the public, should be free. That caught the attention of the folks at Google. While Google Maps and Google Earth were wildly popular with Web users, scientists found the satellite images limiting. Peeping Tom Full Movie Part 1 there. They captured only part of the visible spectrum, and what’s more, they were static.
A picture of, say, a reservoir or a section of forest could tell you a lot about those sites, but only how they looked at one moment on one day. Landsat’s cameras, on the other hand, revisit the same part of the planet on average once every 1. Collect enough of those pictures and sequence them, and you can create a moving image that shows just how a region has changed environmentally — often for the worse — over the years. In 2. 00. 9 Google met with Tom Loveland, a lead scientist with the USGS — which is home to the Landsat archives — about turning the trove of images into maps and mini- movies for the use of governments and researchers around the world. Google and the USGS soon struck a deal, but that was the easy part.
First, even though the USGS had millions of images in its vaults, there were still more to be had, most of them tucked away in active and former Landsat ground stations around the world. Google began reaching out to the countries that are home to those facilities, working to repatriate as many of the images as it could. In one six- month period, it collected half a million pictures, most of them stored in traditional negatives and prints, and began digitizing them.
Even getting the already digitized EROS and Landsat images from the USGS to Google took some doing, necessitating the construction of a new digital pipeline that could handle the massive stream of data. Processing the images required another magnitude of complexity. The atmosphere does not always cooperate when a satellite tries to take a picture from orbit. Everything from cloud cover and industrial haze to smoke from forest fires can obscure the view. Stitching together a panorama, to say nothing of making a moving image, often requires hundreds of images, some of which must be digitally scrubbed to filter out atmospheric interference. A single, cloud- free map of the world requires 9,0. The pictures, and particularly the movies, that resulted from this painstaking work are astounding.
A single pixel measures about 3. That seems like a lot of ground to pack into a single dot, and the truth is, no one pixel reveals very much.
But tens of thousands of them tell rich tales: the decapitation of mountaintops by mining companies extracting the mineral riches beneath; the fish- bone- like patterns loggers carve into forests as they fell trees in intersecting avenues, until the entire region is denuded; lakes and reservoirs that shrink in inverse proportion to the thirsty cities and communities growing up around them; the retreat and disappearance of glaciers. There is some good news: central- pivot irrigation systems can be seen turning deserts into gardens, forming their own pixelated patterns as little circles of green appear, accumulate and expand. There are also the oil sands fields of Canada that pop up from nowhere and aren’t pretty to look at but are helping to free the U.