Earth Day: Climate crisis highlighted in stark Google images

As a way to mark Earth Day on Friday, Google is reminding people of what it’s calling “the most pressing topics of our time: climate change” with four new doodles showing the destruction of ecological areas around the world.

Google says that it has used time-lapse imagery over many decades taken from Google Earth Timelapse, and other sources, to demonstrate the impacts of climate change.

“Time lapses allow us to see our planet in an entirely new dimension — and time. Now anyone can witness nearly four decades of planetary change,” saidRebecca Moore is the director at Google Earth.

The Earth Day Google Doodles show how the glacier at Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa is retreating over time. These images were taken every December from 1986 to 2020.

This same issue is also shown in the photographs taken at Sermersooq in Greenland during the retreat of the glacier in Greenland, which were taken every December from 2000 to 2020.

The third time-lapse sequence captures the bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef on Lizard Island in Australia. It was taken each month from March 2016 through May 2016.

The final Doodle is of the Harz forest in Elend, Germany. It has been destroyed by bark beetle invasion due to rising temperatures. This time-lapse sequence contains images taken every December from 1995 to 2020.

Google claims that each of the four doodles will be displayed on the homepage for several hours.

Earth Day is an international celebration of the earth that raises awareness for environmental protection – it was first observed in 1970 in the United States.

“In the decades leading up to the first Earth Day, Americans were consuming vast amounts of leaded gas through massive and inefficient automobiles,” Earth Day’s organization saidOn its website. 

“Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity. Until this point, mainstream America remained largely oblivious to environmental concerns and how a polluted environment threatens human health,” it added.

However, the stage was set for change with the publication of Rachel Carson’s New York Times bestseller Silent Spring1962

The organisation said the book “represented a watershed moment, selling more than 500,000 copies in 24 countries as it raised public awareness and concern for living organisms, the environment and the inextricable links between pollution and public health.”

Earth Day is celebrated annually in over 190 countries every April 22.