Environment
The Explosive Growth of Eastern China, as Seen From Space
The Pearl River Delta has gone from mostly rural to the world’s largest urban area in three decades.
In the late 1980s, China’s Pearl River Delta was as bucolic as the name implies—a verdant, littoral expanse populated with rice paddies, orchards, and about 10 million mostly rural residents. Fast-forward three decades and it’s now a sprawling maze of development that, with a population of 42 million, is said to be the biggest urbanized region on the planet.
Today NASA is highlighting the delta’s unreal growth spurt with an eye-opening duo of satellite images. The first was taken in 1988 by the Landsat 5 craft and shows vast zones of forests and crops (in green), with moderately sized cities like Shenzhen and Zhongshan appearing as white-and-gray nebulae: