time lapse videos of Earth from satelites

"Two generations, eight satellites and millions of pictures [form] a stunning catalog of images that, when riffled through and stitched together, create a high-definition slide show of our rapidly changing Earth. TIME is proud to host the public unveiling of these images from orbit, which for the first time date all the way back to 1984."

These pictures do not do the videos justice. Click the link at the very bottom of this post to watch the full videos.

Dubai is not the only city whose growth is documented in the archive. The entire Earth is expected to be available. At the link, watch many metropolises from around the world develop from the mid-seventies through to today.

"Since NASA launched the first Landsat satellite in 1972, the program has been in constant operation. Seven other satellites followed the first into orbit over the years, sometimes replacing ones that had reached the end of their operational life, sometimes joining ones still in operation. The most recent member of the fleet, Landsat 8, went aloft in February. At an altitude of 438 miles (705 km), the satellites make one orbit of Earth every 84.3 minutes. Keep that up for 41 years, maintaining a photographic record of your travels, and you compile a whole lot of pictures — millions of them, which have since been digitized into petabytes, or billions of bytes of data."

Watch the videos and learn more here.