Adventures of a Climate Criminal

View Original

Amazing satellite timelapse of forest cover on Earth

From Bloomberg:

“Google Earth has partnered with NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, and Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab to bring users time-lapse images of the planet’s surface—24 million satellite photos taken over 37 years. Together they offer photographic evidence of a planet changing faster than at any time in millennia. Shorelines creep in. Cities blossom. Trees fall. Water reservoirs shrink. Glaciers melt and fracture.

“We can objectively see global warming with our own eyes,” said Rebecca Moore, director of Google Earth. "We hope that this can ground everyone in an objective, common understanding of what's actually happening on the planet, and inspire action."

Right, so if you click on this link, Timelapse will open (slowly! It seems to be rather data intensive).

Then if you click on “Changing Forests” to the right, you find a slideshow of eleven examples of changing forest cover on Earth over the last 30-40 years.

Depending on your mood today:

  • if you are sad and want to remain so, slides number 1-3 are for you.

  • if you are sad and want to be “hopeful”, slides 7-8 are simply AMAZING.

You can see the parts of the Amazon that are truly protected by indigenous tribes!

Screenshot from Google Earth’s Timelapse.

Incredible.

Sometimes you see aid groups and fundraising to help Amazon tribes maintain their way of life and forests, and I’ll admit to being one of the first to say, “That sounds like cowpoo!”

But it really is a thing!

Brilliant.

Go forth and explore, my little ones!