About Earth Timelapse

  • Earth Timelapse provides a zoomable video view of how our planet has changed since 1984, showcasing different types of planetary change.

  • The Timelapse videos page features preview thumbnails with buttons to view or download videos in various 2D and 3D formats, including 4K resolution and options with or without labels.

  • Attribution is required for using Earth Timelapse, citing "Google Earth Timelapse (Google, Landsat, Copernicus)".

  • Earth Timelapse is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The Earth Timelapse dataset provides a four-decade visual record of planetary change spanning from 1984 to 2022. Synthesized by Google from petabytes of spaceborne observations acquired by NASA/USGS Landsat missions (Landsat 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9) and ESA's Copernicus Sentinel-2 constellation, the dataset is offered as annual mosaics for visual interpretation.

The annual mosaics are globally complete, gap-filled, and water-masked visual basemaps that power the public Google Earth Timelapse interactive viewer. Pre-1999 observation voids are smoothly reconstructed using pixel-wise temporal linear regression interpolation across adjacent valid observation years. Open ocean waters are replaced with styled NOAA ETOPO1 shaded-relief bathymetry and global water masking (using Hansen GFC and MOD44W datasets). These data are suitable for: visual interpretation, educational storytelling, base mapping, or custom video exports.

Spatial Resolution Eras

The Earth Timelapse collection spans two distinct spatial resolution eras:

  • 1984–2014 (30 m / pixel): Synthesized from USGS/NASA Landsat 4, 5, 7, and 8 observations. Images are gridded in Web Mercator (EPSG:3857) at a 30-meter resolution.
  • 2015–Present (19.11 m / pixel): Synthesized by fusing ESA Copernicus Sentinel-2A/2B MultiSpectral Instrument (MSI) observations (10 m / 20 m native) with Landsat 8 and 9. Images are gridded in Web Mercator (EPSG:3857) at ~19.11-meter resolution.

The annual mosaics cover all global landmasses and coastal zones from approximately 82.6°S to 83.69°N latitude. Synthesizing over four decades of Earth observation data requires harmonizing disparate satellite constellations across operational lifespans, sensor modalities, orbital geometries, and atmospheric perturbations.

The Earth Timelapse pipeline ingests millions of individual scenes from the USGS/NASA Landsat program (Landsat 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9) and the European Space Agency (ESA) Copernicus Sentinel-2 constellation. To transform raw and Top-of-Atmosphere (TOA) observations into consistent annual basemaps, each scene is processed with:

  • Phenological and seasonal scene filtering to optimize peak vegetation growth and minimize transient seasonal effects.
  • Missing channel restoration and sensor anomaly mitigation (e.g., Landsat 8 TIRS saturation, Landsat 7 SLC-off artifacts).
  • Multi-sensor cloud, haze, and shadow quality scoring combining Landsat simpleCloudScore, heuristic HSV space cloud recovery, and Sentinel-2 Cloud Score+.
  • Panchromatic normalization and structural pseudo-pansharpening to increase the apparent resolution.
  • MODIS BRDF-calibrated radiometric normalization using multi-scale low-pass spatial filtering to eliminate scene boundaries while preserving local surface textures.
  • Water-conscious edge sharpening to avoid coastal shoreline bleaching.
  • Temporal 16-bit median compositing to reject transient atmospheric noise, shadows, and ephemeral artifacts.
  • Temporal linear regression interpolation (for Global Final assets) to reconstruct missing observations in pre-1999 mosaics.
  • Global ocean bathymetry modeling and water masking combining NOAA ETOPO1, Hansen Global Forest Change datamask, and MODIS water masks.
  • Global color balancing, polar ice white-point preservation, multi-scale local contrast enhancement (LCE) for visual enhancement.

Source Data & Sensor Specifications

The Earth Timelapse collection leverages the following spaceborne Earth observation missions:

Satellite and Sensor Specifications

Satellite Mission Sensor Ingested Date Range Spatial Resolution Spectral Bands Ingested Earth Engine Collection ID Mosaic Resolution Era
Landsat 4 Thematic Mapper (TM) 1982-07-01 – 1993-12-14 30 m (MS) Blue, Green, Red, NIR, SWIR1, Thermal, SWIR2 LANDSAT/LT04/C02/T1 30 m (1984–1993)
Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) 1984-03-01 – 2012-12-31 30 m (MS) Blue, Green, Red, NIR, SWIR1, Thermal, SWIR2