Google Timelapse lets you see Shanghai's 30-year transformation

Kiss goodbye to any work you had to get done and lose yourself in Google's incredible Earth Engine site for the rest of the day. They've launched a Timelapse feature, which went live for public usage earlier this week and combines over 5 million satellite images spanning 32 years to create a zoomable, changing image of the Earth.

Naturally China provides for some of the most interesting and rapid transformations over that time period. Here's how the area around Shanghai has changed since 1984, in screenshots (for the video timeline, visit our website or the 'read more' link at the bottom of this page).

And once you're done exploring the changes in our local area, we recommend heading west and south to see overhead images of how regions such as Chongqing and Shenzhen have developed during this time too.

Here's a little more about the project from the people at Google:

'Timelapse is a global, zoomable video that lets you see how the Earth has changed over the past 32 years. It is made from 33 cloud-free annual mosaics, one for each year from 1984 to 2016, which are made interactively explorable by Carnegie Mellon University CREATE Lab's Time Machine library, a technology for creating and viewing zoomable and pannable timelapses over space and time.'