google ocean

The Perpetual Ocean in Google Earth

April 19, 2012

Earlier this month, NASA released a very popular animation titled “Perpetual Ocean“, which showed the ocean surface currents from June 2005 through December 2007.
I felt that Google Earth would clearly be a great way to view this kind of information, but NASA didn’t release it in any kind of Earth-friendly manner. Fortunately, Paul van Dinther from PlanetInAction figured out a way to make it happen!

To play with it yourself, you can try it via the Google Earth Plug-in at planetinaction.com/currents.

Great work, Paul!

Google reorganizes the “Ocean” Layer

December 14, 2011

As Google continues to add more content to the various Layers in Google Earth, they often take time to reorganize things a little bit. This time it’s the “Ocean” layer that’s been somewhat shifted around.
In particular:
• Some items have been moved to the Earth Gallery, including the “Marie Tharp Historical Map”, “MBA: Seafood Watch”, “MCS: Fish to Eat”, “Human Impacts”, “Arctic Sea Ice”, “Sea Surface Temperature” and “Ocean Expeditions”.
• The “ARKive: Endangered Ocean Species” layer is now turned on by default, and shown as purple circles on the globe.
• “Ocean Observations” has been moved to the [Weather] folder.
In all, it’s a nice group of changes. It seems that Google has tried to simplify the [Ocean] layer quite a bit to make it easier for new users to dig in. I’m not sure how many people use the [Earth Gallery] feature, but perhaps this will encourage more people to check it out.
What do you think about these changes?

View new high-resolution underwater terrain to celebrate World Oceans Day

June 8, 2011

In celebration of World Oceans Day, Google has released a significant amount of brand new high-resolution ocean floor imagery, amounting to an area larger than North America!
Captured from nearly 500 ship cruises and 12 different institutions, the data was curated by the Lamont-Dohery Earth Observatory. The image below shows the areas that have been udpated:

To explore more of the new features, Google has created a “Seafloor Updates layer” to show off the highlights, seen here:

The deepest volcanic eruption ever recorded was at the West Mata volcano near Fiji, photos of which can be seen in the Deep Sea Vents Ridge 2000 tour. Coincidentally, Frank is celebrating World Oceans Day by spending a full day diving in the ocean in Fiji. You can read about that experience on the Tahina Expedition blog.
All of this data is fun to look at, but there are some important scientific benefits as well. In particular, a more detailed ocean map can help us understand how tsunamis will spread around the globe. At this point, we know more about the surface of Mars and the Moon than we do about the ocean floor, so advances like these are becoming more critical.
For more about this, you can read the World Oceans Day blog post on the Google Lat Long blog, or visit WorldOceansDay.org.

Panoramio is now adding photos from the Ocean

October 28, 2010

The folks at Panoramio have been busy! Just a few days ago they announced some nicely improved KML files, and now they’ve announced that photos from the ocean will be landing in Panoramio very soon.
They’re working with Google to enhance the “Ocean” features of Google Earth 5, so I assume that we’ll see photos from Panoramio arrive in that layer in the near future.
Of course, this will be an excellent way for Frank to showcase all of the great imagery he’s capturing aboard the Tahina. For example, he shot some amazing photos of the coral gardens in Tonga a few weeks ago, such as the one below:

Panoramio is accepting ocean photos now, so upload them and leave a comment below to share some of your great pictures.

Ocean layer is now a default for all users

April 8, 2010

Just over a year ago, Google unveiled their 3D ocean in Google Earth. Since then, they’ve added a variety of features to it such as improving the visualizations, adding high-res terrain and even adding Frank’s expedition to the layer.
Now they’ve announced that it will be one of the default layers for all users. In addition, they’ve added a narrated tour to their Ocean Showcase to show some regions that are proposed to be marine protected areas.

With the addition of the Ocean layer to the default set of annotations for all users, it will help expose it to a wider audience of users.