With the rapid development and large integration of global informatization and industrialization since the 21st century,the Internet of things and cloud-computing have emerged.The world has entered an era of big data.There are a huge amount geographical and remote sensing data generated every day in the field of geoscience,environmental science and related disciplines.However,the traditional approaches for storing,managing and analyzing massive data on the local platform,which take up lots of resources,time and energy,have been unable to meet the needs of the current researches.Google Earth Engine(GEE)cloud platform is powered by Google's cloud infrastructure,and it combines a large number of geospatial datasets and satellite imagery,in which the datasets could be processing,analyzing as well as visualizing on a global scale.Meanwhile,it uses Google's powerful computational capabilities to analyze and process a variety of environmental and social issues including climate change,vegetation degradation,food security and water resource shortages.Firstly,an introduction of GEE cloud platform has been given.Secondly,recent researches that using GEE cloud platform were reviewed.Thirdly,GEE cloud platform and MODIS land cover type data were used to analyze spatio-temporal changes patterns of major land use and land cover type in Three Gorges Reservoir in the period of 2002~2013.The results indicate the largest changes occurring in forest lands,shrub grasslands and croplands.Finally,after a rough calculation,GEE cloud platform is superior to the traditional approaches in terms of both cost and economic efficiency,improving the overall efficiency by more than 90%.GEE cloud platform could not only provide powerful support to experts in the field of geosciences and remote sensing,but also offer valuable help to researchers in related disciplines. GEE cloud platform is an excellent tool for scientific research in geosciences,environment sciences and related disciplines.