My kids love using Google Earth. With the push of a button they "fly" from Ann Arbor, Michigan to Newfoundland, the Panama Canal, the Great Barrier Reef, or some other place they're curious about.
Now Google has mined satellite images from the U.S. government that allow us to fly back in time.
The USGS Landsat program takes a big camera/satellite like this:
Shoots it up into space like this:
And orbits the Earth taking pictures like this:
The USGS' Landsat program has been around for more than 40 years.
Google, with the help of the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, has taken the millions of images collected by the Landsat program and made them accessible to you and me.
Time magazine describes their feat this way:
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.
By zooming in, we can watch:
- The expansion of Detroit Metro Airport along with the rapid development in that area
- The growth around the Grand Rapids area
- New development around Lansing
- The expansion around Ann Arbor
- And is that regrowth on Canada's Fighting Island in the Detroit River (owned by the BASF Corporation)?
And for a view of what's happened from 1984 to 2012 around the globe, check out Time magazine's Timelapse page.
The USGS' Landsat program will continue to take pictures, documenting how our land and water are changing. Through this program, this powerful history will be accessible to billions of people around the world.
Fly back in time around Michigan and let us know what you find below!
