Carbon dating, of sorts

Had some online fun last night.

No, not that kind. :-)

My oldest discovered that Google Maps had updated their maps of our area. We used to be able to zoom in only far enough to see vague greenish fuzzy blobs for most of this area. Now, we can zoom in far enough to see a whole lot more.

So we embarked on a game, of sorts, to try to figure out WHEN the new pictures were taken. We have it narrowed down to sometime between March 4 and June 30, 2007.

We did this by looking for things that we know had changed, and that we know WHEN they changed.

That barn that burned? Not there in the picture, so it has to have been taken after that fire. The image shows the burned house of a couple of my students, so it has to have been after their fire, but before the house was demolished. The trailers we lived in after our fire ARE in the picture, so it has to have been before we moved back into our house.

Some people date by tree rings.
We apparently date by fire damage.

We tried looking at area construction- and there is plenty of that!- but we didn't know the dates of different parts of the construction process well enough to narrow things down any further.

Anyhow.

Try it.

Look at where you live, see how far you can zoom in, and see if you can find details that tell you when the picture was taken.