Google’s new Earth Engine uses an archive of Landsat satellite images to create time-lapse videos of regions of the earth from space: cities, rain forests, glaciers, deserts, whatever you’d like to zoom in on. There’s no embedding capability yet, so here’s the link to Seattle’s growth since 1984. Click on the year in the lower lefthand corner to make the animation go faster or slower.
You can see that the City of Seattle’s development, constrained as it is geographically, is largely infill for the past two decades. Seattle’s estimated population in 2012 was 616,500; in 1980, about 494,000; in 1990, 516,000.
But zoom out a few stops and watch the Eastside grow north and south, swaths of green vanishing. Consider that what you’re seeing is under the restraint of the Growth Management Act, passed in 1990. King County has grown to an estimated two million in 2012 from 1.2 million in 1980.
What’s missing, it might occur to you, flipping through almost 30 years of satellite images, are the Northwest’s clouds. Google’s done a good job of finding images that are cloud-free, but for truly jaw-dropping images of normally beclouded vistas, you can’t beat MapBox.
Back in early April, they released a number of gorgeous satellite maps created from cloud-free pixels, stitched together without those seams you see on Google Earth. Here’s their Cloudless Atlas view of the Tibetan Plateau and the edge of the Sahara desert.
You can download their MapBox Earth iOS app for free. A basic MapBox account is also free, but sadly does not come with satellite views.
