Environment

New scars for the famous heart-shaped island near Croatia

December 19, 2013

The heart-shaped island of Galesnjak, located off the coast of Croatia, has long been considered a romantic destination when viewed from afar. However, despite many requests to host weddings on the island it’s never been possible due to the thick shrubbery. One of the islands owners, Tonci Juresko, has decided to clear many of the trees from the island and replace them with 250 olive trees, in an effort to be able to host weddings in the future. The long-term goal is admirable, but the short-term result is pretty rough-looking:

All of the imagery in Google Earth still shows the island intact, though I expect a future update will let us see the scars (even if they appear via newer “historical imagery”). You can fly there and see it for yourself by loading this KML file.

(via Digital Journal)

An island on the world’s largest lake on an island in a lake on an island

December 18, 2013

Did the title confuse you enough? If you explore our planet long enough, you’ll find some very neat things, such as the tiny island of Vulcan Point, seen here (inside the lake on the island in the center of the image).

Vulcan Point island is found on Main Crater Lake, which is located on Volcano Island. Volcano Island is found on Taal Lake (which is formed via the Taal Caldera). Taal Lake is located on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. It’s quite an amazing ring of lakes and islands!

The primary reason for the existence of this is Taal Volcano, which helps form some of these pieces. It’s a rather active volcano, with 33 historical eruptions, the last of which was in 1977.

To see all of it for yourself, you can use this KML file to fly out there in Google Earth.

Lava flow shapes in Google Earth

December 13, 2013

Because of the way Google Earth work, volcanoes are almost always amazing to view inside of it. 3D terrain combined with high-resolution imagery makes for some stunning views, as we explained a while back in our “A to Z” post about Volcanoes.

The NASA Earth Observatory recently posted an image and article about “lava flows”, seen here:

From their article:

Streams of molten rock that ooze from gaps or vents in the Earth’s surface are called lava flows, and they can pose a hazard to everything in their paths. These rivers of rock can take many shapes and move at very different rates depending on the viscosity of the magma, the slope of the land, and the rate of an eruption.

While viscous lava flows are defined by steep flow fronts and pressure ridges, low-viscosity lavas tend to move faster and create longer, narrower shapes. They also tend to have smaller flow fronts and levee-like structure along their edges. Many characteristics of a low-viscosity lava flow are visible in this image of Zhupanovsky and Dzenzursky volcanoes on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. The image was acquired by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on the Landsat 8 satellite on September 9, 2013.

To see this volcano for yourself, simply download this KML file and load it in Google Earth. For more, you can read the full story on the NASA Earth Observatory site.

Imagery from Typhoon Haiyan

November 13, 2013

As they often do after major events around the world, DigitalGlobe has begun pushing out a large amount of imagery from the Philippines in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan.

In addition to the image above (which can be found on the DigitalGlobe blog), they’ve been adding quite a few stunning shots to Getty Images.

Taking things even further, DigitalGlobe is enlisting your help to attempt to map the devastation:

In support of such efforts, DigitalGlobe has activated a crowdsourcing campaign, open to anyone willing to help, which volunteers can join here. For this campaign, DigitalGlobe will be releasing the crowd produced results to the open source community. For your knowledge, this has been one of the most challenging Tomnod campaigns due to the sheer magnitude of damage. But within the first few hours DigitalGlobe had 27,000 map views and over 35,000 tags from volunteers!

It’s quite an undertaking, and creating this map will prove to be incredibly helping in the coming days and months as the area works to recover from the devastation of the storm.

Indonesia’s Mount Sinabung in Google Earth

November 4, 2013

8,530-foot-high Mount Sinabung in western Indonesia has erupted again, prompting the evacuation of approximately 1,300 villagers. The mountain has been active for a few months now: 15,000 were forced to evacuate in September and roughly 3,300 were forced to evacuate in October.

To learn more about this and other volcanoes around the world, you can use the [Volcanoes] layer in Google Earth, found under the [Gallery] section. To find Mount Sinabung, just load this KML file and it’ll fly you over there.

For more about volcanoes in Google Earth you can check out this post, or read more about this eruption of Mount Sinabung at ABC News.