watching the world disappear
I watched it all on Google Earth, which on Thursday launched Timelapse, a feature that allows users to watch 37 years of satellite footage blink past in a matter of seconds. The tool, which is remarkable in its accessibility and its sheer amount of data (over 4.4 million megapixels), explicitly shows the effects of human development and climate change. The landing page features tours of various landscapes—under headings like “Changing Forests,” “Urban Expansion,” and “Warming Planet”—with accompanying write-ups for each highlighted place. The language isn’t radical by any means, but more to the point than the vague corporate-journalism I was expecting. In the forests around San Julián, Bolivia, “much of the land is being used to raise soybeans, two-thirds of which are used as animal feed for the beef and pork industries.” Protected areas in the Amazon “didn't happen by accident. Instead they are the result of dedicated activism and bold protective policy.”
In a return to corporatese, Director of Google Earth Rebecca Moore told reporters that Timelapse is “not about zooming in. It’s about zooming out. It’s about taking the big step back. We need to see how our only home is doing.” This “big step back”—five satellites’ worth of photos over almost forty years—is revelatory and important, and will hopefully serve as education and a call to action. Seeing the planet from space can change our sense of scale and stakes: the famous 1972 photo of Earth taken by the Apollo 17 crew became a symbol of the environmental movement, representative of the planet’s fragility and unique beauty. Seeing it in time-lapse form, however, feels different. Made of too much data to wrangle easily into narratives or stand-alone images, it has the overwhelming dread of patterns and trends. Such a remove also makes Timelapse almost alluringly abstract: rivers and roads spreading out with the same eerie silence. It looks like catastrophe; it looks like SimCity.
It also looks like a GIF, ticking along from 1984 to the present, pausing, and then beginning again. GIFs have long been a favorite filetype of mine: as little looping memories, they are both ceaseless and finite. There is a joy to them, an insistence, even as their subjects seem doomed to repetition. On this large of a scale, though, the looping is trancelike and foreboding, a record of the past that looks alarmingly like a simulation of the future. Watching Google Timelapse is like watching a long-fulfilled prophecy bump against the present. It is like watching history happen already, again and again. It is like watching a world of deep greens and blues turn brown and yellow and gray.
When the GIF file format was introduced in 1987, the Aral Sea had split into two separate bodies of water. Now it is the color of sand, passed over by enormous clouds of dust.
ben tapeworm