As they did last year, GeoEye again captured a high-res image of the Burning Man event in northern Nevada. The image was posted at geeked.info, and we took it and turned into a KML image overlay.
The image is remarkably sharp, but it’s over 12MB in size so it’ll take a few seconds for it to load in Google Earth.
As part of the environmentally-friendly policies that Burning Man institutes, such as “Leave No Trace”, they move the exact location around a little bit to help minimize the impact on the area. To illustrate that, here are outlines of Burning Man 2003, 2009 and 2011, and you can see the gradual shift.
To view those overlays in Google Earth, simply load this KML file
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About Mickey Mellen
Mickey has been using Google Earth since it was released in 2005, and has created a variety of geo-related sites including Google Earth Hacks. He runs a web design firm in Marietta, GA, where he lives with his wife and two kids.
They move the city around to study potential impacts.
In a provision created to provide conditions to study the cumulative impacts of the event, the city alternates between the “B site” of BM07 and the “C Site” of BM08.
from 2. DESCRIPTION OF PROPOSED ACTION & ALTERNATIVES
b. Two sites—Rotating between two sites would potentially allow wind eroded areas additional time between uses for recovery associated with transport of playa sediments by surface waters versus creation of a second site with elevated levels of residual debris when compared to overall playa area. The use of two sites would also facilitate the joint BLM/Desert Research Institute study to determine impacts to the playa surface from a single event. This study will begin in 2006.
from http://www.spatial-ed.com/projects/monitoring-at-burning-man.html