Environment

Everything about the El Nino Zone in Google Earth

May 8, 2014

We’ve all heard about El Nino over the years and how it can affect weather patterns, but it can be a bit tricky to understand the relationship between all of the elements involved in it. According to Fabius Maximus, a monster El Nino may be coming this year.

George at MyReadingMapped has put together some great maps to try to explain it.

In George’s words:

This documentary,in the form of a Google Map, accounts for everything you want to know about the El Niño Zone in a Google Map. Like weather changes, the Galapagos volcanic hotspot, changes in Thermohaline Circulation from Deep Current to Surface Current, the Westerly Winds, the submarine topography, disease outbreaks, food shortages, famine and cultural uprisings. I created this map because I discovered that no map to date put all the factors listed above together in one image. You can even compare today’s weather in the zone by turning on the weather feature in Google Map as shown below.

You can check out the map for yourself on his site or you can grab this KML file to see it inside of Google Earth.

Great work, George!

Exploring Earth Day on Google Earth

April 22, 2014

Today is Earth Day, a time to sit back and think about our wonderful planet, and some of us will be out picking up some trash, or just enjoying nature.

For those of you stuck inside due to weather, work, or other reasons – perhaps you might want to spend the day exploring our wonderful planet through the power of Google Earth. Here are a few links of stories from Google Earth Blog in the past year describing environmental related content available for viewing in Google Earth:

For more, you can check out our posts from 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010 or 2009 and read stories that go back even further.

The hidden farms of Chicago

April 15, 2014

NPR’s The Salt recently took a look at Chicago and the many “hidden farms” that can be found on rooftops around the city.

Researcher John Taylor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign spent 400 hours over the course of eight months researching these gardens to determine where the gardens were and which ones were actually producing food. The result was a total of 4,648 sites, covering more than 65 total acres.

“Urban agriculture is sometimes thought of as something new and trendy, but of course people have been growing food in backyards and on vacant land for generations,” Taylor says. “From a planning and policy perspective, we have to consider food production at multiple scales.” Taylor’s data is helping another effort aimed at documenting all of the city’s agricultural sites: the Chicago Urban Agriculture Mapping Project.

You can read more for yourself by checking out the full article on the NPR site. I was able to track down the screenshot above by finding it via the story, and you can view that area for yourself in Google Earth by loading this KML file.

Overlays of affected areas from Oso landslide

March 31, 2014

Last week we showed you some imagery from the landslide in Oso, Washington and this week we’re back with a few overlays from James Baker that help explain things a bit more.

James has created two overlays; one that shows the outline of the extent of the previous landslide, and one that shows the source of the recent slide and run-out areas.

• KMZ of pre-slide area
• KMZ of post-slide area

In addition, he’s created a simple KMZ file that shows the Devils Mountain fault running directly through the affected area. You can download that KMZ here, and see a screenshot of it below.

Great work, James!

The landslide near Oso, Washington

March 27, 2014

Last weekend, rainfall triggered a massive landslide near Oso, Washington that killed at least 24 people. There have been many news reports about the event, but I believe NASA is the first to provide satellite imagery of the area post-landslide.

The imagery isn’t particularly sharp, but it shows the massive scale of the landslide. In addition, the landslide has blocked the Stillaguamish River, creating a barrier lake and flooding additional homes. While the timing is always unknown for events like this, the possibility has existed for years:

According to Durham University geologist Dave Petley, the landslide was a reactivation of an earlier landslide that caused problems in 1988 and 2006. The Seattle Times has reported that retired US. Geological Survey geologist Daniel Miller warned the hillside had the “potential for a large catastrophic failure” in a report filed with U.S. Corp of Engineers in 1999.

You can read more about this image on the NASA Earth Observatory site or grab this KML file to view it directly in Google Earth.