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SearchReSearch

Answer: What happened here over the past 40 years?

Dan Russell • November 18, 2020
 SearchReSearch
Republished with permission from SearchReSearch
Answer: What happened here over the past 40 years? Dan Russell

Date shakes.... yum.....

Shields Date Farm--with excellent date milkshakes and fascinating educational videos.


I haven't been to Indio in probably 20 years, so I was fairly surprised when I happened to look at the Coachella Valley on Google Maps last week. It's a MUCH different place than I remember from the days when we drove through in search of date-based frozen confections.

It's useful to know this: the center of US date production is near Indio, in the Coachella Valley. That, plus ice cream, means date shakes.

All of these changes leads us to this week's Challenge:

What are the largest changes to landuse in the Coachella Valley over the past 40 years? (That is, the valley centered around: 33.711896, -116.210818) What kinds of changes can you spot?

There are many ways to do this piece of SearchResearch, but a GREAT way start such investigations is by getting a visual overview. Google Maps works well to get a look at the place from the maps overview.


Even at this range, you can get a big clue from all of the green blocks...


That's a lot of golf courses! It's even more interesting in satellite view:


Aside from all of the green here, there's also a LOT of water in this view.

Of course, Google Earth has archival images (we've discussed this before). Here's a pic from 2002 of the Indio area. Contrast this with the image above from 2020.



But wait--isn't this a desert? Look at the color of all the ground all around the valley! Note how far away Death Valley is (not far).


So, sure, the valley is pretty clearly well-watered, but surrounded by desert. (And yes, I know that looks like a giant lake in the bottom right corner--but that's the Salton Sea. It's pretty salty--about 60 parts per thousand. By comparison the ocean is about 35 PPT. What's worse--the salinity of the Sea increases every year since it doesn't have an outflow, but just slowly evaporates.

From a land-use perspective, how is it possible to support all of those golf courses and lakes in the desert?

While that's an interesting land-use question, how can we quickly get an overview of 40 years of land uses? That's a lot of time to cover. What about a timelapse satellite view?

My query:

[ time lapse Earth ]

leads quickly to Google Earth Timelapse. It doesn't take long to search for Indio and the Coachella Valley. Here's the YouTube video I made that neatly shows the enormous changes in the valley between 1984 and 2018.