Mount Kilimanjaro, Sermersooq, Great Barrier Reef, Harz Forests featured in the doodle
The world’s most popular search engine, Google, dedicated its homepage logo doodle for April 22, 2022 to climate change to mark Earth Day.
The doodle, which changes to note anniversaries or global observances, showed how the defining topography of four places located far away from each other have been altered due to the anthropogenic phenomenon.
The four locations displayed are Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Sermersooq in Greenland, Great Barrier Reef in Australia and Harz Forests in Elend, Germany. The team that created the doodle used real time-lapse visuals of these places over a specified period from Google Earth, an online live 3-D model of Earth rendered from satellite images and other sources.
Each set of images were turned into a gif. The first gif showed the retreat of the glaciers from the slopes of Mt Kilimanjaro from 1986 to 2020. Scientists have attributed the loss to global warming as well as change in land-use, mostly deforestation.
The second showed loss of glacial ice in Greenland over two decades. The images were taken annually from 2000 to 2020.
The subject of the third gif was the Great Barrier Reef. It showed the extent of coral bleaching on Lizard Island, Australia over March, April and May in 2016. The images were gathered from The Ocean Agency, an international non-profit that works on marine conservation.
The final one illustrated the destruction of Harz Forests in Elend, Germany from 1995 to 2020 by bark beetle infestation. Rising temperatures and severe drought are responsible for this loss of green cover.
Google, which records over 8 billion searches every day, has dedicated its daily doodle to Earth Day several times since the feature was rolled out in 1998. Climate change was the theme of the artwork for the first time this year.
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