Darrell Etherington calls our attention to a cool new project from Google that uses satellite imagery to track changes in land use since 1984:

The result is a series of interactive time lapse images that progress year-by-year, showing exactly how things have changed in key areas like the Brazilian Amazon Rain Forest, booming metropolitan areas like Las Vegas and Dubai, and the progress of large bodies of water like the Aral Sea.

It’s stunning to watch the Amazon rainforest virtually disappear, or see the building creep across the desert in Vegas, or watch the Columbia Glacier vanish entirely. Google worked with the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA and TIME magazine to build the Timelapse project, and went to Carnegie Mello University’s CREATE Lab to build the final HTML5 site that makes the animations interactive and browsable.

Watch your planet dry up here!