Eight years ago, farmland and some small villages covered the area where a new airport now sits outside Beijing, with a massive starfish-shaped terminal—the largest in the world—made from 220,000 tons of steel. A new book, called Overview Timelapse: How We Change the Earth, uses satellite images to document the transformation from above, along with dozens of other examples of how humans are reshaping the planet.
Grant started collecting satellite images six years ago and publishing them online, inspired by the so-called “overview effect,” the phenomena of awe that astronauts experience when they see the Earth from above for the first time. In 2016, he published a collection of the images in a book. The new book focuses on changes over time, from deforestation in Brazil, the disappearing Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and the sprawl of Tesla’s Gigafactory in the Nevada desert, to wildfires in California and the polar vortex in Chicago. Many of the images are unfamiliar from above: lithium mines in Bolivia, fracking wells in Oklahoma, a petrochemical plant in Louisiana that makes components for plastic. Several of the final images offer some hope, including the world’s largest solar plant, nearly complete in Egypt, and a wind farm off the coast of the U.K.
