Google’s fun Earth Engine lets you look at maps of the world going back nearly 30 years, so you can see how an area has changed over time. Usually, the resolution isn’t good enough to turn up much of anything, but one area it works pretty well is with reclaimed land along coastlines. And between Songdo in Incheon and Saemangeum in Jeolla Province, Korea has a couple of big reclamation projects going on. So I checked them out on the Earth Engine to see how they looked.

Here is Songdo, the new “international business city” being built southwest of Seoul, close to the Incheon airport:

If you want to see some good pics on the ground of what Songdo looks like today, you should check out the photography of Robert Koehler (like this one):

Saemangeum is even bigger, with around 400 square kilometers eventually to be reclaimed from the sea (or so I read). I don’t know how much they’ve done so far, but it is fascinating to watch, along with the building of that huge sea wall: