Google Earth has added a large number of older images to their database. This was announced officially on the Google Lat Long Blog yesterday. Why bother with historical images of our planet? Just take a peak and you’ll get it: aside from being able to see how the earth looks today, we can also see how things looked in the past. This can put a picture to the information we normally only see as statistics.

One of the images with the biggest impact on me was the comparison of a piece of Amazon rain-forest in 1975, compared to a more recent picture. The first one shows pristine green rain-forest, and in the second we see how severely deforested the same region is a few decades later.

Benefits of Google Earth’s historical images

Aside from satisfying our own curiosity, this new feature can help non-profits and activist organizations illustrate their mandate. Seeing deforestation in pictures has a greater impact than hearing how much forest we are losing every year. In addition:

• Educators and parents can use this in the classroom or at home to educate children on the recent history of our planet, and the impact humans have on how it looks.
• Educate and inform people about natural disasters, the Google Lat Long post has a picture taken just after hurricane Katrina, showing a largely submerged piece of highway.
• Urban planners (and researchers!) can compare old images to new ones of basically any city in the world. How do urban areas develop, how can we do better, and what could be expect in the future are all questions I could see these historical images address.

Researchers could also look at areas that were previously undocumented in terms of changes in landscape, rivers becoming larger or smaller, or other geographical information. I’m sure there are plenty of remote areas of the planet that have not been studied in great detail in the past, and this can give us a starting ground to understand more about how the world looked in the past and why it looks the way it does today.

Did anyone notice I’m a researcher? I’m sure you can come up with other great reasons to love this new development in Google Earth, and I really look forward to seeing them in the comments, but the first thing I thought of when I read the news was ‘research!’.