Google Earth Environment Guide

Arctic Eye

Time-lapse views of melting ice caps reveal disturbing changes
As a research scientist for the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado, Walt Meier has spent uncountable hours examining satellite images of ice caps. “Generally we just look at images side by side,” Meier says. But spotting dynamic trends with static pictures isn’t easy. Last year, Meier and his colleagues began adding daily images of Arctic sea ice to Google Earth. “We animated, in a time series, a set of still images, and we immediately saw something crazy going on.” In just two months, more than half the Arctic sea ice had vanished.

Since nothing is ever simple in climate science, Meier can’t be sure that melts like these will become the norm. Last year’s dramatic melt, scientists surmise, was partially the result of a long-lived low-pressure system that parked itself over Siberia and pumped warm air from the south up to the Arctic. But Meier believes that Google Earth could help predict any imminent melt-off. “The big advantage is that we can bring in other data sources, like air temperature, weather and ocean currents, to be overlaid with sea-ice data. That really lets us see what’s going on.”

In the meantime, NSIDC glaciologists have integrated ice data from around the globe with Google Earth. They’ve animated 25 years of vanishing ice in Greenland and the breakup of the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica and documented peripatetic icebergs in the South Atlantic Ocean, dwindling permafrost, and receding glaciers in Alaska. For anyone who still doubts that Earth’s ice is creeping toward extinction, Meier has a movie to show you.

View NSIDC data on Google Earth here.