For the past 40 years, Las Vegas, like many American cities, has struggled to get a handle on its urban sprawl. Now, a new satellite video from NASA shows just how much the city grew away from its urban core. The video shows the city’s growth spurt from 1972, when the metro area had a population of about 300,000, to 2010, when it reached nearly 2 million people. Check out NASA’s video:
According to NASA, the large red areas are generally green space, golf courses or city parks, and the gray areas are infrastructure. The images were taken by NASA’s Landsat satellites and were created “using reflected light from the near-infrared, red and green portions of the electromagnetic spectrum,” NASA said. The Landsat satellites aren’t just good for observing the rate of urbanization in cities, they are also helping with other studies, NASA explains:
Landsat data have been instrumental in increasing our understanding of forest health, storm damage, agricultural trends, urban growth, and many other ongoing changes to our land resources. Studies using Landsat data have helped land managers keep track of the pace of urbanization in locations around the world.
