How to see Climate Change images on Google Earth (2024)

In the Timelapse section of Google Earth you can find numerous aerial photographs showing how various landscapes of our Planet have changed over the past years. Here's how to watch our planet's climate change on Google Earth.

Google offers a variety of services around the world, from email to cloud storage and Google Maps, GPS navigator that helps us choose routes and search for addresses and places on the map. Google also has a special tool called Google Earth that allows you to see a panorama of the entire Earth from different angles based on satellite images, combined into a single 3D image.

Google Earth is constantly updating itself to provide unique images and information, such as the aerial photographs of natural landscapes published as Google Doodles on April 22, when the world celebrated the International Earth Day. This Day, also known as International Mother Earth Day, is dedicated to drawing attention to environmental issues, global warming and other challenges facing our Planet.

What is Google Earth Timelapse?

One of the parts of Google Earth is Timelapse, a special section that clearly shows how the Earth has changed over the past decades. The Google Earth Timelapse service is designed as a scalable time-lapse video of various places on the planet, from changes in great forests, rivers and lakes, the results of forest fires - to projects of new types of energy, such as solar panels fields or wind farms. This is an interactive map compiled from satellite photographs, giving insight into how diverse landscapes have changed from the early 80s of the last century to 2022. Here you can find various regions and cities, showing processes such as global warming, forest change, urban expansion, modern human migration, as well as more detailed virtual tours such as "Air Pollution in London", "True People of the Amazon" or "Tokyo Island Heat Effect" and many many others.

How to see climate change in Timelapse?

To see how the Earth's climate has changed over the past decades, you simply find the Timelapse page in your browser and select the thematic virtual excursion you need, for example, "Warming Planet" (to access the service you need to have a Google account and log in).

Here, you will see a window with Earth 3D images, and using the arrows under the aerial image, you can choose from 11 different regions of the planet, such as the glaciers of Greenland, the dry Aral Lake, the ice mountains in the Himalayas or the glacier on Mount Kilimanjaro, or the fire-damaged forests of Canada.

Using the "+" and "-" buttons you can change the image scale, and use the cursor to move around the aerial map of the earth. The 2D button converts the image to 2D format.

On the right side of the screen, a moving scale with different years switches between aerial images, showing images from different years and thus giving you an idea of ​​the changes in the landscape.

In the sections "Fragile Beauty", "Changing Forests", "Urban Expansion" and other virtual excursions of the map you will find more aerial photographs from different years, capturing both natural changes such as volcanic eruptions or the movement of sand in deserts, and the harmful changes that economic Human activities are causing in nature reserves and protected areas, such as rivers in the Bolivian countryside or Mead Lake near Las Vegas.

Google Earth is a service that can provide you with a lot of varied information about our Planet, including determining the exact location. Read about how to find the coordinates of a specific place by entering geographic coordinates into Google Earth and changing the image format in our detailed Guide.