The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2021
Google Earth turns 37 years of satellite imagery into an explorable 3D timelapse
Google stitched 24 million satellite photos spanning 37 years into a browsable 3D timelapse, making environmental change visible and explorable by anyone.
What it had to solve
Billions of people had used Google Earth to explore the planet for 15 years, but the world is changing at an unprecedented pace and people struggle to understand their own impact. Google wanted environmental information to be accessible to everyone, in a form that was striking rather than abstract.
How it works
Billions of people had used Google Earth to explore the planet for 15 years, but the world is changing at an unprecedented pace and people struggle to understand their own impact on it.
Timelapse in Google Earth used 24 million satellite photos from the past 37 years to create a fully explorable 3D view of the planet over time. Instead of showing people charts about climate change, Google let them zoom in on any place and watch decades of change unfold.
The result made environmental information accessible to all in a striking and universally understandable way. The work sits in D&AD's awards archive, where its idea — a map that carries time as an explorable dimension — is the documented invention.
Why it lands
- Adding time as a fourth dimension turns a static map into a story every user can direct.
- Real satellite imagery is the proof, so no charts or lectures are needed to make the point.
- Change becomes personal: zoom to a place you know and watch what happened there.
- The scale of the data (24 million photos, 37 years) is itself the claim that this is the whole planet, not a sample.
What it did
Planetary-scale environmental change became something anyone could see for themselves, in a striking and universally understandable form rather than as abstract statistics. The work is archived by D&AD as a digital experience reference; the idea stands on making time a dimension anyone can explore.
What you can take
To make a huge, slow problem graspable, change the unit of experience: hand people a way to watch the change with their own eyes instead of telling them about it.
Since then
Timelapse in Google Earth is archived in D&AD's awards archive, which records no engagement or audience figures. The lasting idea is that a globe can carry time: by letting people explore change rather than read about it, Google made an abstract environmental problem into something visible at planetary and street level.
Sources
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