Check out the following tour, assembled by UNEP, highlighting the Aral Sea in Central Asia, where irrigation and water diversion has led to a dramatic shrinking of the lake beginning in the 1960s and continuing today.īut most of all Earth is about exploring and discovery it's about gaining a new insight and a new view on the world we live in. With Google Earth's new Historical Imagery mode, we have brought much of this imagery directly into the client increasing the ease of use, availability, and exposure of this spectacular and revealing data. This imagery was served as a KML overlay and, while fascinating, could sometimes be cumbersome to use. Their Atlas of Our Changing Environment has been a Global Awareness Layer in Google Earth since 2006, showing land cover change through a series of historical images.

For years, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has used Google Earth to raise awareness about environmental change. In addition to being just plain fun, historical imagery is a powerful tool for exposing changes to our neighborhoods, communities, and the environment. That's all there is to it! Now you can fly around to different spots in the world and explore our archives to see what imagery we have to show of the location. If there are just too many ticks marks grouped together try using the zoom in and zoom out buttons to expand or contract the timeline.

You can move the slider back and forth along the timeline or use the arrow buttons in the upper left corner to step from one date to the next. The tick marks on the slider represent images in our database that are available for your current view. The time slider allows you to change your view to imagery which is older than the date shown on the slider. The historical imagery time slider will appear just beneath the toolbar. To transition to historical imagery mode, open up Google Earth 5.0 and click on the clock icon in the toolbar: So now that you know the backstory, you're probably ready to dive right in and take a look.

Up to date google earth