Last Friday was Earth Day, the annual event to support environmental protection. You may have missed it for whatever reason – some of us did – but luckily Google didn’t. To remind us how immediate climate change is, the tech giant released several powerful images of our planet’s rapidly changing appearance.
And as you can easily see from the images, the threat is very real: climate change has melted icebergs, created deserts and bleached the world’s coral reefs, and these are just the most visible effects. Check it out for yourself:
The visible transformation of the Earth
In beautiful Tanzania, near the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. Time-lapse photos show how the ice cap has melted dramatically since 1985. Google Earth notes that almost 85% of the glacier has melted and disappeared in the last century alone.
One of the clearest images is that of the Columbia Glacier in Alaska. Photos from 1984 to 2020 show the movements of the glacier, which has retreated a total of 20 kilometers to the north due to a number of factors, including rising temperatures.
In the meantime, the Serling Tsho in the Himalayas has expanded, mainly due to the melting of the glaciers. Since the 1970s, its area has expanded by a whopping 40 %. The dramatic expansion of the lake can be seen in images covering the period between 1985 and 2020.
But while some lakes around the world have expanded, others have shrunk to almost nothing. Lake Urmia in Iran was once the second largest saltwater lake in the Middle East, but it has shrunk by 90 % since the 1970s. Rising temperatures have contributed to the decline in water levels, but illegal wells, dams and the detour of water for cultivation have also had a dramatic impact.
Another world-famous case is the Aral Sea, which lies between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Once the fourth largest lake in the world, by 1997 it had shrunk to 10% of its original size. So much so that the eastern basin is now a desert.
You can see all the time lapses on Google Earth, along with videos from organizations like NASA. The goal is to show the changing face of the Earth and the resulting impact on everything and everyone who calls the Earth home.
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