'Timelapse' Video Shows Eagan's Development from 1984 to Today

The 29-frame video starts in 1984, just a decade after Eagan was incorporated. The bird's-eye view looks down on a pixelated city of muted green, littered with beige polygons of development clustered around staggered beige lines. It's a sparse sight, but the picture is recognizably Eagan.

As the video plays out haltingly—each frame a year—you can see Eagan's development boom played out on a canvas framed by highways, the fields turned piecework to pavement between Highway 55 and Interstate 35E and between 35E and 494. By 2012, the final frame in the 3-second video, Eagan's population has nearly tripled.

The video, watchable here, is part of Google's satellite "Timelapse" project, designed to show humans' effect on the planet.

"With the help of massive amounts of computer muscle, they have scrubbed away cloud cover, filled in missing pixels, digitally stitched puzzle-piece pictures together," Time Magazine described the project. "These Timelapse pictures tell the pretty and not-so-pretty story of a finite planet and how its residents are treating it — razing even as we build, destroying even as we preserve."

Take a look at the video of Eagan on Google's website. What do you think about when you watch the video?