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People Rising
Viewing world population growth from 1950-2005 in Google Earth
I've made a time animation that shows the world's population as it changes over the last 50 years. The goal of this project is to show a time animation of the change of population in each country from the period of 1950-2005. The goal is to show visually both how much the population has increased as a whole and to show how much the population distribution has changed. Research shows that Europe's percentage of world population has dramatically declined in the last 50 years, while those of Africa south of the Sahara and Western Asia (particularly Nigeria and Pakistan) have dramatically increased. We are able to see these trends in the animation I've built.
To view the animation, you must have Google Earth.
Here you can download the KML file for viewing in Google Earth.
The UN has data available on world population for the last 50 years. I downloaded the data from that website as an Excel table. This is a link to the quick data search page, where I found my data.
Getting a kml file of polygon data for country boundaries was relatively easy using the GE Community site. There, I found the latest GE Graph output - the World Population Exploding 3D Graph by user giasen. After downloading this file and looking at the kml, I added the population data in GE Graph for each country, creating a new kml for each year. A snapshot of the GE Graph interface shown below.
Using this interface, I created 12 new kml files (one every 5 years from 1950-2005) of showing world population data. Once these kml files were created, I opened them up and simply added a Timespan tag in for each of the polygon folders. Each file will has a timespan of 5 years and the animation runs from 1950-2005. Each of these kml files I loaded into one kmz file linked to below.
Below are a few snapshots to give a picture of how I've shown the data.
Even better, you can see the animation from afar with this video courtesy of a fellow Google Earth user (giasen).
To download the project in kmz format to view in Google Earth, click here.
This project was done for a course at Université de Montréal.
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