Earth Day today and Google are dedicating their Doodle to how badly we treat our favorite planet. This is a very nice Doodle, with four different GIFs that show the dramatic changes due to climate change.
From the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, you will see shots of corals losing their color due to warmer waters. Corals are living creatures that take their color from the algae with which they have a symbiotic relationship. As the temperature of the oceans rises, the corals lose these algae and so we have a sad phenomenon called "bleaching".
A massive bleach hit the Great Barrier Reef this year, according to the Ocean Agency in March. It is one of the consequences of global warming by more than 1 degree Celsius. The time-lapse in Google doodle shows whitening in 2016, when we had another mass whitening event. The images come from the non-profit organization The Ocean Agency.
The other two GIFs show glaciers disappearing from Greenland's Sermersooq and from the summit of Tanzania's Kilimanjaro for decades. Kilimanjaro is an inactive volcano and is one of the three glacier peaks in Africa. If these glaciers continue to recede at the rate they are now melting, they could disappear completely within a few decades.
Google's latest GIF depicts the destruction of forests in Elend, Germany. Here, the gray remnants of the trees occupy a very large part of the Harz National Park (Harzer Silberwald or Harz Silver Forest). It is the result of the catastrophic drought that weakened the trees, leaving them more prone to attack by bark beetles.
By clicking on today's Doodle you will find a lot of information that Google has edited for the ongoing climate crisis.
