Science

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Geology in Google Earth

August 12, 2014

We’ve shown you a lot from George at MyReadingMapped over the years, and he’s back with another one. This project is called the “Google Map of Geology”, and George describes it as follows:

My latest project is a Google Map of Geology which matches up examples of faults, eskers, monadnocks, folds, fabric, depressions, roof pendants, rift valley, kettles, hoodoos, and the like, that can be seen in Google Map and Google Earth with their geologic terminology. I was surprised to discover that much of the details like stratum, joints, lava field fissures, dykes, talus, etc. can actually be seen in a satellite image and that a specific rock the size of a tor can be plotted.

It’s an amazingly detailed map that George has clearly put a lot of time into. Check it out for yourself on his website, or you can grab this KML file to view it directly in Google Earth.

Nice work, George!

DigitalGlobe helping to track forest fires

July 31, 2014

DigitalGlobe is one of the leading providers of satellite imagery for Google Earth, and now they’re teaming up with the World Resources Institute to track fires across southeast Asia via their new Global Forest Watch Fires system.

From an article by Yuchen Wu in the Boulder County Business Report:

Nigel Sizer, global director of the World Resource Institute’s Forests Program, said, “With DigitalGlobe’s imagery, you can see down to the individual tree level and even identify species. DigitalGlobe imagery is processed as color-infrared, enabling WRI to quickly distinguish between healthy and dead vegetation, draw burn area boundaries, and detect burn scars in order to assign accountability to the fires.”

It’s a great way to use DigitalGlobe’s impressive ability to capture imagery to make a difference in the world.

Using Google Earth to enhance urban agriculture in Rome

July 29, 2014

Urban agriculture can be a great thing, but can be difficult to effectively plan and manage. Flavio Lupia, along with other researchers from the National Institute of Agricultural Economics in Rome have been making great use of digital mapping tools to help research and plan ideal locations around the city.

You can read more about their work in this PDF document, which goes into detail about their work, such as:

The current version of the database contains more than 4,000 polygons spread over a total surface of about 35,000 hectares with a total farmed area of 400 hectares. The geodatabase was realized by interpreting the high resolution images of Google Earth for the year 2007 and 2013 allowing further analysis on the temporal evolution of the phenomenon.

Beyond that, here are some additional thoughts from Flavio:

Despite in Italy there are some private and governamental bodies producing regularly very high resolution aerophotogrammetric scenes the restriction and policy distribution of the data don’t allow researchers to perform this kind of analysis.
Although in Italy, especially during the last year, the concept of open-data is becoming more and more common this is still a theoretical idea since public administrations have releases very few geospatial data.
GE allows to perform the photointerpretation process, the digitalization and the multi-temporal analysis with an easy to use single tool.
The entire mapping project employed only human resources (researcher for the photointerpretation), no costs for tools and images acquisition and pre-processing thanks to GE.
Even if the radiometric and spatial resolution of the GE imagery are lower than those provided by the Italian public bodies, the researchers demonstrated the fitness-for-use of GE for mapping urban agriculture. The images are sufficient to discover cultivated parcels as small as 8 square meters in size and allow to photointerpreters to use all visual element to identify cropping activities (tone, color, texture, pattern, etc.).
Since 2011 GSV report the timestamp in the GE status bar. This helped researchers to have a clear idea about the acquisition time during the “virtual field check”. Nonetheless some limitations in the usability of GSV exist: 1.the temporal mismatch between GE imagery used for parcels identification (year 2013) and GSV (2011-2012). 2.the temporal variation among the single images of GSV, in fact scenes acquired in different times are woven together to form a continuous coverage along the streets (in our study area we found GSV images acquired in 2011 and 2012).

It’s an excellent use of Google Earth, and it should help result in great things for the city of Rome.

45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission

July 18, 2014

This Sunday 45 years ago, July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the moon.

One great way to experience the landing is by viewing this amazing Google Earth tour that Sean Askay put together a few years ago.

As you can see in the tour, the landing that Armstrong made was remarkable. With very little fuel, he had to carefully maneuver the ship into a gentle landing. Paul van Dinther created a game to simulate the landing that he calls the Apollo 11 Moon Lander. The game is very fun, and quite challenging – here is a review written by Frank when it was released. In the years since then, Paul has updated the game with some new graphics, Facebook integration and bug fixes. You can also watch this short video of the game in action:

You can check out the game for yourself at planetinaction.com/moonlander/.

Lastly, of course, is the excellent “Moon” feature in Google Earth, released in 2009. There is some remarkably sharp imagery in places on the moon, and even 3D models of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module.

Exploring earthquake fault lines in Google Earth

July 16, 2014

We’ve talked about Earthquakes quite a lot over the years, as Google Earth is a great tool for visualizing those types of events. However, we’ve not shown very much related to the actual fault lines themselves.

Ervin Malicdem at S1 Expeditions recently took a look at the West and East Valley Fault System in the southern Philippines. The fault line is growing in interest for a simple reason that Ervin explains:

The last known activity along this fault line was the year 1658 and is estimated to be active every 300 years plus or minus 100 years. As of the time of this writing, it has been 356 years ago and is well within the potential period of its movement.

He has created an excellent overlay that shows the fault line in comparison to infrastructure along the path of it.

You can read more on this blog entry or download this KML file to view it in Google Earth.

The USGS also has some solid fault line maps that you can use in Google Earth. If you visit their Quaternary Faults in Google Earth page, you’ll find a variety of KML files that you can download and explore in Google Earth.