Google Earth Animates Climate Change Over Next 100 Years

Through a collaboration between Google and the British government, two cool new environmental layers for Google Earth were officially unveiled a few days ago by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the Google Zeitgeist UK conference.

Aptly named, Climate Change in Our World, the project draws data from the Met Office Hadley Centre and the British Antarctic Survey and uses Google Earth Outreach to create interactive animations that, respectively, show world temperature changes over the next hundred years, taking into account greenhouse gas emissions and the retreat of Antarctic ice caps since the 1950s.

The first layer, produced from the data supplied by the Hadley Centre depicts CO2 concentrations spanning from November 1999 forward to October 2099.  Along the time line, annotated place markers pop up to provide information on the impact of global climate change for specific regions and links to external resources on the topic.

The second layer, utilizing data provided by The British Antarctic Survey, documents the Antarctic ice shelves retreat since 1940 and constructs a projected regression through June 2099.  The layer is covered with dates of specific discoveries and documents the retreats of 10 different ice shelves.