Imagine if Merida’s explosive growth since the 1980s was visible in a time-lapse video. The techs at Google has made it happen.
Press the forward-arrow on the image above for a glimpse.
Merida, along with Cancun, Los Cabos and other cities around the world, are featured in an upgraded Google Earth platform released today.
Google Earth Timelapse is a global, zoomable video that lets anyone explore the last 35 years of the planet’s surface—from the global scale to the local scale. The update adds two additional years of imagery to the time-series visualization, now spanning from 1984 to 2018. A toggle feature allows users to switch back and forth between map and satellite view.
The launch has its roots in a Google partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), NASA, and Time Magazine in 2013.
Outside Mexico, the interface also shows the Alaskan glaciers melting, the destruction of the Amazon rain forest and evolving urban growth in other cities such as Las Vegas.
Additionally, Google Earth Timelapse finally has mobile-phone support, Google reported. That upgrade was overdue, industry observers said.
The design of the new Timelapse interface leverages Material Design with simple, clean lines and clear focal areas. The new user interface was contributed to the open-source Time Machine project, used by researchers including teams at Carnegie Mellon.
