Three Decades Of The Earth Changing Captured In Timelapse Images

The world is changing at a rapid pace and this timelapse sequence, shared by TIME and constructed from footage captured by the Google Earth Engine, just reconfirms how quickly expansion really is happening. 

The timelapse features various views of the earth captured via satellite from space and the journey begins in 1985 where places such as Chongqing in China are rather desolate but just 30 years later, people have built extensively on what once was empty space. It's quite fascinating to see how civilisation almost crawls across the landscape, building structures as it moves, how coastlines retract and the way in which the edges of lakes change in shape / size almost to a pulse-like rhythm. 

Google combined over 5 million images, captured by 5 satellites, over the past three decades to create the timelapse footage. 

Last year, NASA shared a video showing 1-year in the life of earth, created from 3000 photographs which were captured by a camera that's approximately 1 million miles away from our planet.