NASA captures Dubai’s ‘insane’ 11-year urbanisation

NASA captures Dubai’s ‘insane’ 11-year urbanisation

Ever had a feeling someone’s watching you? Well NASA’s been stalking Dubai for 11 years now. And here’s a compilation of their photos.

January 25, 2012 4:16 by Precious de Leon

The Kipp team has pretty much grown up with Dubai, with the latest recent team member clocking in at 12 years in the city. So yeah, we’ve pretty much scene the city get built around us.

And while, yes, we have a hate-love-and-then-laugh-about-it-later relationship with this city, we’ve got to admit that it’s nice to see a global audience notice the city we temporarily call home (if you think more than a dozen years is temporary).

And this Wednesday, a Kipp reader spotted a video on Gizmodo, which shows the changes of Dubai’s shoreline over the past 11 years (2000-2011).

We don’t blame them for using the word’s ‘insane’ and ‘uncontrollable’ when describing Dubai’s growth, because yeah the pace was pretty much unbelievable.

The video is a compilation of images taken by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Radiometer (whew, what a mouthful) on NASA’s Terra satellite.

Gizmodo attributes the video to the earthobservatory.nasa.gov , which gives more details about the Palm projects. Although Kipp highly doubts NASA ever consulted Nakheel about these descriptions, seeing as they’ve described the Palm as “a massive engineering project to create hundreds of artificial islands along its Persian Gulf coastline. Hmm, we wonder if anyone will actually phone it to have this changed to ‘Arabian Gulf’ instead.

Just imagine how different these photos would look like if the Palm Deira and the Palm Jebel Ali went full throttle as well. And how many of the in-land projects are we missing from these photos, we wonder.

Anyway, here’s the link to the video:
Eleven Years of Dubai’s Insane Growth Seen From Space

Or you could just check out these photos from NASA’s Earth Observatory website that were used to compile the images: