CDMX. (El Financiero). – Google Earth Timelapse presented several updates this past Thursday April 25, including videos that from a satellite perspective show the changes occurred over a period of 35 years in several cities, including Cancun (Quintana Roo) and Merida (Yucatán).
The short videos range from 1984 to 2018 and make clear the demographic change of both cities. Mérida in 1980 had 424,529 inhabitants according to INEGI. By 2015 Merida had a population of 892,363 people and by 2019 it is estimated at around 1.1 million.
Currently Yucatan has 2.2 million inhabitants, the vast majority in the area of Merida and its surrounding municipalities, according to state government data.
At the beginning of the 80’s, a few years after its creation, Cancun had 37,190 inhabitants; the last Inegi Census in 2015 reported a population of 743,626 people. Projections by the municipal government of Benito Juarez – the official name of the tourist destination – estimate that the population is currently close to one million inhabitants.
The Google Earth Timelapse platform launched a global video with images that show the transformations that have taken place from 1984 to 2018 and allows anyone to explore the changing surface of our planet, from the global scale to the local scale.
Among the updates, Mexico only included the timelapse of three cities, Merida, Cancun and Los Cabos, due to the accelerated increase in human activity in these locations, which in the video is more noticeable in certain periods of time than others. The Santa Fe area in Mexico City was also included.
Using Google Earth Engine, Google Cloud’s platform for geospatial analysis on the petabyte scale, more than 15 million satellite images are combined to create 35 global cloud-free images that make up Timelapse, along with mobile support and updates to make exploration more accessible and intuitive.
Among the videos that can be viewed are phenomena such as the emergence of Dubai’s Palm Islands, the retreat of Alaska’s Columbia Glacier and the impressive urban expansion of Las Vegas, Nevada.
To access any of these videos, you can start by exploring Timelapse on the Earth Engine website, or taking a world tour through YouTube.
The Yucatan Times
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