Science Ideas with GE

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Meteor Craters on Earth

Over the last few millions of years the Earth has had quite a few impacts from meteors, asteroids, and maybe even peices of comets. Scientists have confirmed 172 locations on the Earth determined to be "impact structures". In fact, the leading theory for the mass extinction of many animals, including the dinosaurs, 65.5 million years ago was an impact crater known as the "Chicxulub crater". These locations have been documented in a database available at the Earth Impact Database.

Thinklemon.com has taken the Impact Database and created Google Earth network links (he gets extra points for this) which not only shows the location of the 172 impacts, but shows a size indicator for the larger ones and provides links to Wikipedia articles and other information in the descriptions. He has organized the list by major continents and also includes a list of the top 25. Here is his announcement with his links, or you can download the entire collectionnow. This is a very nice collection, and since I have a degree in astronomy myself, I just had to write about this. Great job Caspar!

By the way, a good friend of mine has spent over 20 years as an astronomer helping to find near-Earth objects which may someday strike the Earth. He works at the Spacewatch Project at the University of Arizona. If anyone with lots of funding is looking to help us make plans to avoid a major future impact, Spacewatch would be a good project to fund.

Solar Eclipse Paths in Google Earth

Total solar eclipse March 29 in Google EarthRecently someone contacted me with some interesting Google Earth files which show solar eclipse paths (where the eclipse is viewable on the ground), both total and annular (for information on solar eclipses see this Wikipedia article). His web site contains a few historical ones dating back to 1961, but is mostly focused on near-term (those in this century) future eclipses. The next total solar eclipse is only 76 days away on 29-March-2006 and crosses over a lot of land mass from southern Russia, across Kazahkstan, Turkey, and right across north-central Africa. Here is the [EDIT: typo corrected] 29-March-2006 Total Eclipsepath for Google Earth. Now you can plan your trip with Google Earth for the best location to view the Eclipse, find an airport, make hotel arrangements, figure out which geocaches are nearby, etc. Thanks to Xavier Jubier for creating the GE files and informing me about them. Also, his data came from Fred Espenak, at NASA/GSFC.

By the way, last October someone at the Google Earth Community, calling himself 'yaohua2000', posted a huge repository of all the solar eclipses (4.7 Mbytes)since the year 1001 for GE. WARNING: this might take a while to load (4.7 Mbytes), and your Earth will look like a yarn ball after it loads (he defaults with all the eclipse paths turned on). I recommend after it loads you find the placemark folder in your Temporary Places folder called "Eclipses" and turn it off. Then open the folder and turn on the type and year of eclipses you want to see (it is well organized hierachically). This is a very interesting collection of data. I was able to find a total eclipse I saw as a child (a long time ago).

NASA Annual Day Land Temperatures of the Earth

NASA Day Land Temperatures in Google EarthMy friend Valery Hronusov from Russia's Academy of Science in Perm, Russia (aka Valery35 at the Google Earth Community) continues his prolific output of cool Google Earth files. He has been converting a variety of data sources about our environment from NASA into cool Google Earth visualizations. Today Valery will share with you this collection of overlays showing the progression of day time land temperatures for the Earth for entire years starting with year 2000 until 2005. The data comes from NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite project. These are not satellite/aerial photos, but are images of temperature data overlayed on top of GE's satellite photos.

(NOTE: this is another example of data which would be great if GE had a feature for allowing you to animate placemarks based on time - a feature Google has been considering implementing. Michael Jones, take note!)

Once you download the Day Land Temperaturesfile, you will see some sub-folders for each year. You should open these sub-folders and turn on each month to look at the data. On my system, if I just turn on an entire year, it kind of animates the overlays while loading them the first time. But, a better way to see the progression of the data is to use the movies Valery has created: small movie (1.2 Mbytes) or larger movie (3.7 Mbytes).

Great work Valery! I'll be sharing some other similar stuff Valery has done later this week.

Lava Flows in Google Earth

Lava Flows of Mauna Loa in Google EarthThe screenshot you see here is depicting lava flows from Kilauea Volcano Mauna Loa in Hawaii. The flows exposed are colored differently and marked according to the year of the flow as analyzed by scientists. Download the lava flow fileto see it yourself. If you hold the Control key and click on one of the flows with the mouse in GE you will see the year of that portion of the flow (a '0' means unknown). It's interesting to compare the lava flow dataset to the satellite/aerial photos in GE. This 3D model was posted by a Google Earth Community member called 'KASSPER' who apparently is a GIS professional. The Control-key click technique is a good way to annotate models like this. KASSPER has produced other interesting applications like the Wikipedia search tool.

[EDIT 3:30PM: A reader contacted me to let me know the flows came from Kilauea Volcano, not Mauna Loa. Thanks John!]

New Volcano Layer in Google Earth

A month ago I wrote about an excellent placemark collection on global volcanoes from the Smithsonian Institution. Well, Google thought it was good enough that they have now included this collection as a default layer in Google Earth (this was part of the new layers which were updated on June 11). In your "Layers", open the "Geographic Features" folder and turn on "Volcanoes". You will get red volcano placemarks. When you click on the placemark you get excellent descriptions and photos for each volcano. You can also use the pan/tilt option in Google Earth and look at the satellite/aerial photos on top of the 3D mountain terrain (assuming you have the "Terrain" layer turned on).

My friends at GoogleSightSeeing.com have declared today their second annual Volcano Day. They have several interesting places to look.

Earthquake Monitoring

USGS Earthquakes in Google EarthEarthquakes are happening around the world all the time, we just can't feel all of them. The US Geological Survey (USGS) is constantly monitoring the Earth with sensitive instruments and for some time now has offered ways of sharing their data on the web through their Earthquake Hazards Program. In addition to RSS feeds, they introduced Google Earth KML network links which allow you to continuously monitor the status of earthquakes around the world. You can zoom in and look at the areas in the detailed satellite or aerial photos of GE. But, since most of the photos in GE are one or more years old, you won't see evidence of that recent quake.

You have two main options off the USGS Earthquake Hazards page, plus a third option I found for just bigger quakes:

This is real-time data which can help you determine whether that shaking you felt really was a quake. One Google Earth Community member wrote how he experienced the earthquake data first-hand.

Enhanced Avian Flu Outbreak Tracker

The work by Nature Magazine Senior Editor Declan Butler to share Avian Flu Outbreak data using Goolge Earth was enhanced this weekend. Declan has announced a network linkwhich will automatically reflect his weekly updates. The underlying data is now based on ESRI's ArcGIS software, and converted for Google Earth using Arc2Earth. For reference, Declan has provided an excellent (and quite colorful) poultry density map for the world to show the relation of cases reported to the population of poultry. And finally, you can visit the web page he has created which provides the link to the network link and also provides background information on the data. This new version replaces the version previously reported.

One thing the new data makes apparent is that the avian flu continues to spread. If you open the folders you can turn on the placemarks for each year since the flu was first reported. Someday Google Earth will have a feature allowing you to automatically reflect the time spread of data. For now, you'll have to click the folders for each year on and off. The new Avian Flu tracker lets you easily distinguish between bird and human cases as well. This is an excellent example of using GIS data and visualizing it with GE. The authors of Arc2Earth have recently released a new walkthrough guide on how to convert GIS data for use with GE.

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Jane Goodall Gombe Chimpanzee GeoBlog V2.0

Jane Goodall Gombe Chimpanzee Blog/Geoblog in Google EarthEarlier this year the Jane Goodall Institute became the first blog to provide their geographically tagged blog entries using exclusively Google Earth's KML file format with the Gombe Chimpanzee Blog. Each blog entry was a placemark with pictures, text, and links sometimes to other content. But, you still had to go to the blog to download each blog entry's KML file.

Now the Gombe Chimpanzee Blog has come out with a major update for Google Earth users. Not only that, but Google recently updated the area with a nice high resolution sateillite photo. The new blog entriesare enhanced with snazzy formatting to provide an almost web-page quality to the placemark description. (I've noticed some flashing problems when these placemark descriptions load on Windows XP - especially if you move the mouse. But, they still look really nice). Part of the new design includes a side bar with links to a lot of other information you can load. For example:

They also have other files showing the watersheds, streams, trails, and roads. By the way, their roads layerprovide roads for all of Tanzania.

News of this update came via OgleEarth who says that Bryce Tugwell is the guy who made these excellent updates to the Gombe Chimpanzee Blog. Great work!

Glacier Melt in Google Earth

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has released a web site called "The State of the Cryosphere". The word "cryosphere" refers to low-temperature elements of weather such as ice and snow and includes sea ice, freshwater ice, snow, glaciers, frozen ground and permafrost. As most people are aware, we appear to be in a period of global warming and many parts of these frozen domains are melting. The NSIDC was formed in part by NOAA and has created this web site to help inform the public.

Recently the NSIDC has added a Google Earth fileshowing some of their data including links to snow and ice, permafrost and glacier data sets. You can see they have a few photographic pairs showing glaciers from a few decades ago, and photos now. The amount of glacial melt is astounding. The glaciers viewed from within Google Earth's satellite photos using the 3D panning and tilting gives you some unique perspectives. Via OgleEarth.

Weather and Storm Tracking Tools for Google Earth

Weather tools in Google EarthLast summer Google Earth Blog collected a few of the better tools for tracking storms in Google Earth. Now GEB will maintain a network link with some of the best weather tracking tools available. If you save the weather and tracking tools network linkin your My Places you will automatically get the latest collection when you turn it on. The current collection contains a global hurricane tracking tool, global cloud maps, severe weather warning data and radar data from NOAA for the US, weather observations for the US from WeatherBonk, a real-time day/night viewing tool, and the global annual lightning flash rate map from NASA. The collection will grow and improve over time. Here is a list of the current contents with links to stories about the tools here at the GEB:

Katrina Time Animation in Google Earth

Hurricane Katrina Time Animation in Google EarthThe new time feature in the latest Google Earth 4 Beta (4.0.2080 or greater - download here) enables you to simply put a time stamp on your data and Google Earth will then allow you to animate through the data using a time slider gadget. A number of interesting applications of the time feature were implemented within days after the new beta was released. Brian Flood, the creator of Arc2Earth (a software application used to take data from ESRI ArcGIS software), has developed a very slick animation showing satellite photos of Hurricane Katrina, overlayed over sea surface temperature, and also includes vector track data and storm strength indicators. Download Brian's Katrina file, and you should see the time gadget appear. Shrink the time slider width to a small size, then select the time "play" button (shaped like a right arrow play button on TV remotes).

I would like to see meteorolgists do this with current weather data. Weather sites should take note. Google Earth is a great visualization tool for weather. Check out some cool storm tracking tools and other weather resources collected by Google Earth Blog.

Track Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Lane in Google Earth

Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Lane in Google EarthTwo new storms to follow. Hurricane Helene is in the mid-Atlantic well away from land. Hurricane Lane, however, is a category 3 hurricane threatening the west coast of Mexico with sustained winds of 120 mph (194 km/h).

You can use Google Earth to track all current tropical storms by using this excellent storm trackerby 'glooton' which was posted at the Google Earth Community. This uses a network link to automatically show you the most current storms world-wide by scanning weather sources on the Internet. It shows you the past track and the forecasted path, and icons indicating strength of the storm. It also shows you the web cam locations/pictures for towns near an approaching storm, wind strengths, satellite photos, and more. There is another hurricane tracker(for Atlantic storms) which shows model forecast tracks, satellite photos, and other data. This was done by Paul Seabury and posted at the GEC as well. Also, Paul's network link now includes some interface enhancements if you use GE 4. Also, check out these and other weather tools put together by Google Earth Blog.