These gifs are pretty much useless in showing the real destruction because they're only looking back 30 years and showing the changes of little plots of land here and there.<p>If you compare North America today with what it was before Europeans landed. You'd see a truly horrifying picture. Something like 70% of the forests of North America are gone. Just load up google maps in satellite mode and look at the USA. Farms and settlements are literally everywhere. Brazil too has lost a massive chunk. Entire forests along the ocean are gone. So has europe. And in Australia Koalas are becoming endangered because of the loss of their habitat. In Asia, rain forests are being cut down for palm oil plantations. And don't even get me started on the "Great African Land Grab" in which rich countries bought prime fertile African land for pennies per hectare.<p>This continues to this day: 6 percent of [the US lost it's] forest cover in just five years time, a total of 120,000 square kilometers (46,332 square miles)<p>( <a href="http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0427-hance_forestloss.html#PuEszYs3LDm28uWC.99" rel="nofollow">http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0427-hance_forestloss.html#PuE...</a> )<p>Let's not forget the enormous swaths of plastic swimming around in all the major oceans: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch</a><p>The fact that more than half of all the streams in the USA are too polluted to support normal life: <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2300022/More-HALF-U-S-rivers-polluted-support-life-shocking-report-reveals-scale-water-contamination.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2300022/More-HALF-U-...</a><p>And don't get me started on particles from the pollution in China crossing the Pacific Ocean and entering the US Eastern Coast. As well as residents living near highways have a 27% increase in Asthema. And the list goes on and on.
Amazing. This is the area where I grew up (in Australia). The area features 3 "open cut" coal mines. One of which has been going through a reforestation process over the past decade or so.
<a href="http://earthengine.google.org/#intro/v=-38.2235574,146.46468559999996,11.614889860260392" rel="nofollow">http://earthengine.google.org/#intro/v=-38.2235574,146.46468...</a>
Does anyone have an authoritative, scientific resource that can quantify human impact on Earth in our presumably negative ways? I want to understand more about the issues as a whole but from a macro standpoint, ideally backed with numbers and science from a trusted third party.
I've been looking at the aftermath of the deforestation of Ireland for the past couple of weeks. The country was down to about .1% forest in 1900 due to: clearing forests to put down insurgency, building British navy, burning wood for fuel, clearing marginal land for potatoes (then abandoning it after a couple of years), sheep. After the wood was gone, people started burning the soil (peat) for heating.<p>Now, much of Ireland is a denuded landscape that may never recover. The scary thing is that this is now what people are used to and think is normal.<p>Reforestation has brought back the forest cover to 10%, but most of it seems to be non-native species and not the Oaks, Elms, etc that used to be here.
Pictures are certainly worth a certain number of words, but sometimes all you really need is the hook of an idea to really grasp a much larger concept. In this case, I've always been caught by something Jared Diamond wrote in "Germs, Guns, and Steel". (What do you mean you haven't read it? Drop everything and go read it now!)<p>I'm paraphrasing, but the gist was this: You know that war that the US has been fighting in Iraq? You know all the images of desert warfare from over there?<p>That's the "Fertile Crescent".<p>If it doesn't seem so <i>fertile</i> any longer, that's almost entirely due to human activity.
I am still amazed at how small the UK is (I think I read it was roughly the size of Florida).
Even though I knew the general area I had to zoom farther than I thought to see it.<p>On second look I think it's the type of map. It seems lower than I would recognize from other maps.<p>The area around Cairo expanded like crazy.<p>Definitely bookmarking this for later.
Wish this went back to the 60's. I have heard about how much of SV was farmland (orchards) when my parents first arrived, and would <i>love</i> to see a timelapse that visualizes the change over time here.
Wow. It is quite scary these pictures. I lived in Vegas for 10 years and personally saw Lake Mead slowly going away every year. I hope more people will take notice and help anyway they can.
The Earth is fine, people. One herd of farting cows diminishes all the human effort in CO emission decrease in nearby town. One volcano eruption diminishes it worldwide. One major earthquake contributes to Earth landscape change more than all the humanity did.
Claiming that human can change the Earth is like claiming that the single flea drives the whole elephant.
Earth is fine, people.