[Music]
they’re mapping the world’s most
precious resource of course that
immediately poses the question what is
the world’s most precious resource and
I’m guessing for some of you it might be
gold or diamonds and for some of you it
might be oil or gas maybe but in fact
for every one of you and in fact never
mind every one of you every living thing
its water no water no life now we know
that most of the world’s water is
actually stored in the oceans and then
some of it’s stored in the clouds and in
snow and in ice and some of it’s under
the planet’s surface and some of it’s
actually in you as well but less than
one in a thousand liters sits in the
lakes and the rivers and the wetlands on
the land which is where we live and so
that makes it incredibly important
because it means if we want something to
drink we don’t need to dig a well it’s
there because it sits on the planet’s
surface it also affects the climate and
it affects the movement of animals and
agriculture and it affects transport and
biodiversity it affects energy
production
it affects culture think of a house with
a view of a lake and a house without a
view of a lake sadly it also affects the
movement of pollution and toxin and
diseases so because of its importance
you would think that we knew where every
last drop of it was but we don’t in fact
all the maps that we have of water are
wrong some of the time and some of the
maps that we have are wrong all of the
time and the common thing there is time
we know that water flows and water moves
but in fact water bodies change too
Lakes dry up when we down a river we
create a new lake it was land now it’s a
lake rivers meander remove and we create
new rivers as well we call them canals
but effectively we created an artificial
river so over the years
is what is drawn on a map and what is
really there is different and then even
within a single year things change as
the wet season comes wetlands form as
the summer season comes melt ponds form
as the growing season comes the farmers
flood the fields so even within a year
water changes so if we’re going to map
this ideally we’d have a time machine
but we don’t have a time machine we do
have satellites and we have satellites
like this one that the United States
Geological Survey which is an awful
mouthful so we say USGS have been flying
for many many years now not only have
they been flying them for years and
these things take a picture of the
planet surface every 16 days they’ve
been keeping the pictures archiving them
and also making them freely available so
that someone like me can go back in time
and we can look at what the lakes in the
Alps around her AZ looked like in 1985
so on satellite pictures like this
vegetation looks green clouds are white
towns and and bare soil is the brown
color and water appears black because I
have my time machine I can jump forward
30 years as well and I can look at the
change now not much has actually changed
in terms of the water here Lake Maggiore
was here
10,000 years ago and it hasn’t changed
much in the interim some years it does
when it’s a very very wet year than the
lake will expand ever so slightly and
that can have a massive impact if you
happen to be living in that little bit
of land that’s usually lamb but is now
under water so it will affect you
personally on the global scale not such
a big impact but that’s not the case
globally if we go to the Amazon forests
now and we’re looking at the same sort
of area it’s about nearly 200 kilometers
across that picture same as before what
we can see there is one river coming
across the main body of the of the image
and we can see one road then in the
middle of the 1980s a
damn is starting to be built they’ve
cleaned all the forest out building a
dam to build a hydroelectric power
station close the down and the river
starts turning into a lake and it fills
and it fills and it fills and over the
space of two years we flood two and a
half thousand square kilometres of
forest used to be forest
now it’s lake if you want to see that
continues for the next thirty years that
lakes still there today it wasn’t there
in 1985 now we have a lake that if we
moved it to the Alps it would be that
big it would fill everywhere from Milan
up to Switzerland and it wasn’t there 30
years ago so things are changing now
here’s our first problem these
satellites are measuring light color
effectively and water isn’t one color it
depends on what’s in it and what’s under
it so it’s a huge challenge to map it
globally second problem we face is when
you look at the planet from space
there’s a lot of stuff that isn’t water
looks like water so you have to resolve
this confusion and I work with some very
smart people at the joint research
center who’ve been capable of doing that
so we’ve resolved that problem that
leaves us the second problem we’ve not
got to do this once if we’re going to
cover the whole planet we’ve got to do
it three million times to build up that
time series that that time machine going
back thirty years and that’s a big
computational task if we’d had one
computer we’d have to switch that
computer on when Charlemagne conquered
Saxony in 804 and leave it running 24
hours a day seven days a week 365 days a
year
for 1,200 years is that much computer
time now we also work with some pretty
smart people at Google’s Earth engine
and they got our expert system to run
not on one computer but on 10,000
computers so we were able to take all
those satellite images and turn them
into a unique set of maps which now
include time so
the intensity of the blue this is a
river in India that you can see the
intensity of the blue is directly
proportional to the amount of time that
that location has been underwater so if
it’s bright blue it’s been always always
water for 32 years where it’s a lighter
color it’s been under water for less
time because it’s digital we can
actually turn that into maps of change
so the black areas on the map is where
there has been no change over 32 years
the red is where it used to be water and
now it’s land and the green is where it
used to be land and now it’s water and
we can compute those changes across the
entire planet and what we find is that
the planet over 32 years has lost ninety
thousand square kilometres of lakes and
rivers they’ve just gone now if you just
think for a moment that the European
Union has 86,000 square kilometres of
permanent lakes and water we’d lose
everything in 32 years we haven’t lost
all our water but other parts of the
world have and when we look at the
planet in the global context we find
that most of that loss is concentrated
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have lost the
Aral Sea Afghanistan and Iran have lost
the Hammond wetlands Iran has lost Lake
Urmia
and Iraq is losing all of the lakes
around Baghdad now it’s not just the
scale of the loss it’s the speed over
the loss if we zoom in on the lakes near
Baghdad and we look at what it was like
in 1985 a full lake 15 years later the
islands have got a little bigger and the
lakes contracted slightly but not much
change but look what happens in the next
15 years between 2000 2015 the lake is
gone so it’s the speed of the change as
well and of course that has a massive
impact on people’s lives factors has a
massive impact on all life but so too
does the inverse getting more water
increasing war
we tell ourselves we need downs we need
them for the hydroelectric and we need
them for irrigation but when you build
the dam you change everything
you change everything above where the
dams built and below where the dams
built and when we look at that on the
planetary scale we do not see the same
concentration because many people are
building dams we have our friend bal
bina in brazil but that’s just one of
many dams that brazil is built us has
built dams Sudan has built dams Spain
has built dams Turkey has built dams
India has built them China has built
dams Canada’s built dams Mayan was built
I could carry on for ages in total we
might have lost 90,000 square kilometres
but we’ve gained a hundred and eighty
four thousand square kilometres but
twice as much water as has been lost
effectively the world is getting wetter
now most of that is due to dam building
but not all of it and on the third pole
the Himalayan plateau we’re finding that
all of the lakes are increasing in size
because of climate change
increased snowmelt increased glacier
runoff and every single Lake if we go
into the Tibetan Plateau is growing in
size in total we’ve lost about 8,000
square kilometres of grazing land and
that’s forcing animals away it’s
threatening roads it’s threatening
villages it’s having a huge impact so
what we’re finding is that as we’ve
looked at our planet from space when we
first looked at it we changed the view
of the planet forever but what we’ve
been doing in the last 30 years is
measuring the change that we’re wreaking
on our planet that we’re exerting on our
planet and we have to change the way
that we’re working and if we’re going to
do that it’s got to be based on facts
now seeing is believing and if I sit on
this data and hold it to myself it’s not
going to help you or anybody else so the
European Commission’s Copernicus program
and our friends at Google Earth engine
are making
all of these maps and all of the data
and all of the statistics available free
to everybody so you can go to this map
site and you can see the true beauty of
our watery world for yourself
seeing is believing you can download the
data even so we’re making this data
available we’re making it available to
scientists we’re making it available to
politicians and we’re making it
available to you so go there look at the
maps and enjoy it thank you
[Applause]
they’re mapping the world’s most
precious resource of course that
immediately poses the question what is
the world’s most precious resource and
I’m guessing for some of you it might be
gold or diamonds and for some of you it
might be oil or gas maybe but in fact
for every one of you and in fact never
mind every one of you every living thing
its water no water no life now we know
that most of the world’s water is
actually stored in the oceans and then
some of it’s stored in the clouds and in
snow and in ice and some of it’s under
the planet’s surface and some of it’s
actually in you as well but less than
one in a thousand liters sits in the
lakes and the rivers and the wetlands on
the land which is where we live and so
that makes it incredibly important
because it means if we want something to
drink we don’t need to dig a well it’s
there because it sits on the planet’s
surface it also affects the climate and
it affects the movement of animals and
agriculture and it affects transport and
biodiversity it affects energy
production
it affects culture think of a house with
a view of a lake and a house without a
view of a lake sadly it also affects the
movement of pollution and toxin and
diseases so because of its importance
you would think that we knew where every
last drop of it was but we don’t in fact
all the maps that we have of water are
wrong some of the time and some of the
maps that we have are wrong all of the
time and the common thing there is time
we know that water flows and water moves
but in fact water bodies change too
Lakes dry up when we down a river we
create a new lake it was land now it’s a
lake rivers meander remove and we create
new rivers as well we call them canals
but effectively we created an artificial
river so over the years
is what is drawn on a map and what is
really there is different and then even
within a single year things change as
the wet season comes wetlands form as
the summer season comes melt ponds form
as the growing season comes the farmers
flood the fields so even within a year
water changes so if we’re going to map
this ideally we’d have a time machine
but we don’t have a time machine we do
have satellites and we have satellites
like this one that the United States
Geological Survey which is an awful
mouthful so we say USGS have been flying
for many many years now not only have
they been flying them for years and
these things take a picture of the
planet surface every 16 days they’ve
been keeping the pictures archiving them
and also making them freely available so
that someone like me can go back in time
and we can look at what the lakes in the
Alps around her AZ looked like in 1985
so on satellite pictures like this
vegetation looks green clouds are white
towns and and bare soil is the brown
color and water appears black because I
have my time machine I can jump forward
30 years as well and I can look at the
change now not much has actually changed
in terms of the water here Lake Maggiore
was here
10,000 years ago and it hasn’t changed
much in the interim some years it does
when it’s a very very wet year than the
lake will expand ever so slightly and
that can have a massive impact if you
happen to be living in that little bit
of land that’s usually lamb but is now
under water so it will affect you
personally on the global scale not such
a big impact but that’s not the case
globally if we go to the Amazon forests
now and we’re looking at the same sort
of area it’s about nearly 200 kilometers
across that picture same as before what
we can see there is one river coming
across the main body of the of the image
and we can see one road then in the
middle of the 1980s a
damn is starting to be built they’ve
cleaned all the forest out building a
dam to build a hydroelectric power
station close the down and the river
starts turning into a lake and it fills
and it fills and it fills and over the
space of two years we flood two and a
half thousand square kilometres of
forest used to be forest
now it’s lake if you want to see that
continues for the next thirty years that
lakes still there today it wasn’t there
in 1985 now we have a lake that if we
moved it to the Alps it would be that
big it would fill everywhere from Milan
up to Switzerland and it wasn’t there 30
years ago so things are changing now
here’s our first problem these
satellites are measuring light color
effectively and water isn’t one color it
depends on what’s in it and what’s under
it so it’s a huge challenge to map it
globally second problem we face is when
you look at the planet from space
there’s a lot of stuff that isn’t water
looks like water so you have to resolve
this confusion and I work with some very
smart people at the joint research
center who’ve been capable of doing that
so we’ve resolved that problem that
leaves us the second problem we’ve not
got to do this once if we’re going to
cover the whole planet we’ve got to do
it three million times to build up that
time series that that time machine going
back thirty years and that’s a big
computational task if we’d had one
computer we’d have to switch that
computer on when Charlemagne conquered
Saxony in 804 and leave it running 24
hours a day seven days a week 365 days a
year
for 1,200 years is that much computer
time now we also work with some pretty
smart people at Google’s Earth engine
and they got our expert system to run
not on one computer but on 10,000
computers so we were able to take all
those satellite images and turn them
into a unique set of maps which now
include time so
the intensity of the blue this is a
river in India that you can see the
intensity of the blue is directly
proportional to the amount of time that
that location has been underwater so if
it’s bright blue it’s been always always
water for 32 years where it’s a lighter
color it’s been under water for less
time because it’s digital we can
actually turn that into maps of change
so the black areas on the map is where
there has been no change over 32 years
the red is where it used to be water and
now it’s land and the green is where it
used to be land and now it’s water and
we can compute those changes across the
entire planet and what we find is that
the planet over 32 years has lost ninety
thousand square kilometres of lakes and
rivers they’ve just gone now if you just
think for a moment that the European
Union has 86,000 square kilometres of
permanent lakes and water we’d lose
everything in 32 years we haven’t lost
all our water but other parts of the
world have and when we look at the
planet in the global context we find
that most of that loss is concentrated
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have lost the
Aral Sea Afghanistan and Iran have lost
the Hammond wetlands Iran has lost Lake
Urmia
and Iraq is losing all of the lakes
around Baghdad now it’s not just the
scale of the loss it’s the speed over
the loss if we zoom in on the lakes near
Baghdad and we look at what it was like
in 1985 a full lake 15 years later the
islands have got a little bigger and the
lakes contracted slightly but not much
change but look what happens in the next
15 years between 2000 2015 the lake is
gone so it’s the speed of the change as
well and of course that has a massive
impact on people’s lives factors has a
massive impact on all life but so too
does the inverse getting more water
increasing war
we tell ourselves we need downs we need
them for the hydroelectric and we need
them for irrigation but when you build
the dam you change everything
you change everything above where the
dams built and below where the dams
built and when we look at that on the
planetary scale we do not see the same
concentration because many people are
building dams we have our friend bal
bina in brazil but that’s just one of
many dams that brazil is built us has
built dams Sudan has built dams Spain
has built dams Turkey has built dams
India has built them China has built
dams Canada’s built dams Mayan was built
I could carry on for ages in total we
might have lost 90,000 square kilometres
but we’ve gained a hundred and eighty
four thousand square kilometres but
twice as much water as has been lost
effectively the world is getting wetter
now most of that is due to dam building
but not all of it and on the third pole
the Himalayan plateau we’re finding that
all of the lakes are increasing in size
because of climate change
increased snowmelt increased glacier
runoff and every single Lake if we go
into the Tibetan Plateau is growing in
size in total we’ve lost about 8,000
square kilometres of grazing land and
that’s forcing animals away it’s
threatening roads it’s threatening
villages it’s having a huge impact so
what we’re finding is that as we’ve
looked at our planet from space when we
first looked at it we changed the view
of the planet forever but what we’ve
been doing in the last 30 years is
measuring the change that we’re wreaking
on our planet that we’re exerting on our
planet and we have to change the way
that we’re working and if we’re going to
do that it’s got to be based on facts
now seeing is believing and if I sit on
this data and hold it to myself it’s not
going to help you or anybody else so the
European Commission’s Copernicus program
and our friends at Google Earth engine
are making
all of these maps and all of the data
and all of the statistics available free
to everybody so you can go to this map
site and you can see the true beauty of
our watery world for yourself
seeing is believing you can download the
data even so we’re making this data
available we’re making it available to
scientists we’re making it available to
politicians and we’re making it
available to you so go there look at the
maps and enjoy it thank you
[Applause]
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