In many ways, the internet is simply an extremely badly coordinated attempt to document our planet. Hundreds of millions of photos are uploaded online every day, depicting ourselves, our cities, our landscape, and our food. However, they're also isolated and disparate: it's difficult to sieve anything meaningful from the avalanche. Researchers from Google and the University of Washington have found a way though, creating a powerful set of algorithms that automatically sorts millions of online photos into time-lapses of everything from skyscrapers to glaciers. The internet is plugged in at one end, and a record of our changing world comes out the other. They call it "time-lapse mining."

"We can now almost instantly create thousands of time-lapses."

"Ultra-slow changes are documented by the billions of photos that people take over time," write Ricardo Martin-Brualla, David Gallup, and Steven M. Seitz in a paper documenting their work. "Whereas before it took months or years to create one such time-lapse, [with our algorithms] we can now almost instantly create thousands of time-lapses covering the most popular places on earth."