Since 1988 , the population along China ’s Pearl River Delta has grown by a whopping 32 million people . Now boasting a total population of 42 million , it ’s the largest urban domain on the satellite . To put it into perspective , 42 million mass is more than the universe of Canada , Australia , or Argentina .
Just 27 years ago , the average - sized cities of Shenzhen , Guangzhou , Foshan , and Dongguan were surrounded by mostly rural areas . But as these artificial satellite images show , these cities have grown so rapidly that they ’ve flux into a massive , interlink megapolis .
NASA explain more :
If ask as one entity , the Pearl River Delta region has overhaul Tokyo as the world ’s largest urban area — by size of it and universe — according to an depth psychology of satellite and demographic datum publish by the World Bank . Between 2000 and 2010 , the Pearl River Delta ’s urban blank space — defined as areas where the build surround covered more than 50 percentage of the landscape in a given pel — had expand from 4,500 square kilometers to 7,000 hearty kilometers . ( In 2010 , Tokyo had a universe of about 32 million people and cover about 5,600 square kilometers . ) In the bailiwick , researchers used satellite data collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer ( MODIS ) and country cover data from the Landsat program . They also used demographic data prepared by the AsiaPop project .
No other areas in China feature this pattern of growth .
[ NASA Earth Observatory ]
ChinaDemographicsScience
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