Google Earth has undergone its biggest update in four years – allowing users to turn back the clock and see how various locations have changed and developed over several decades.

And there are some locations that have undergone significant changes and development such as Istanbul's new airport, which opened in 2020 – built on a scale that will allow it to serve 200 million passengers by 2028, making the Turkish capital a global hub between Asia, Africa and Europe.

One of London's financial hubs, Canary Wharf, in the east of the city, has undergone major development and transformation over the years. The location was one of the busiest docks in the world between 1802 and 1939. However, as shipping declined, all docks were closed by 1980. And the construction of the skyscrapers in Canary Wharf began in 1988, with its first building, One Canada Square, being completed in 1990.

It is this sort of evolution of places that Google Earth images can now illustrate through its time-lapse feature.

Berlin's Brandenburg Airport is another such project – it opened in 2020 after a nine-year delay due to countless setbacks including poor construction and corruption allegations. It took 29 years from when plans to build it were first started.

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Rebecca Moore, director, Google Earth, Earth Engine and Outreach at Google, posted on Twitter: "Excited to launch Timelapse in Google Earth today! Google Earth's formerly static snapshot of the planet is now dynamic, providing ongoing visual evidence of Earth's changes from climate and human behavior occurring across space and time, from 1984-2020."

Google Earth's new time-lapse feature uses 24 million satellite images from the past 37 years compiled into an interactive 4D experience. 

"Now anyone can watch time unfold and witness nearly four decades of planetary change," Moore wrote in a blog post.

"It took more than 2 million processing hours across thousands of machines in Google Cloud to compile 20 petabytes of satellite imagery into a single 4.4 terapixel-sized video mosaic — that's the equivalent of 530,000 videos in 4K resolution," she added.

Google says the entire computing was done inside its carbon-neutral, 100 percent renewable energy-matched data centers, which are part of its commitment to help build a carbon-free future. 

It will continue to add new photos to this interactive feature annually over the next decade. This new feature is global, so users can type in a location and find the images that are available.

"As far as we know, Timelapse in Google Earth is the largest video on the planet, of our planet. And creating it required out-of-this-world collaboration," acknowledged Moore.

For this update, Google collaborated with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the U.S. Geological Survey's Landsat project, and the EU's Copernicus project.

The company worked with experts at Carnegie Mellon University's CREATE Lab to develop the technology that powers Timelapse. 

"We worked with them again to make sense of what we were seeing," said Moore. "As we looked at what was happening, five themes emerged: forest change, urban growth, warming temperatures, sources of energy and our world's fragile beauty."

Video Editor: Pedro Duarte