Google Earth Blog

The amazing things about Google Earth


NSIDC

A Climate Change Tour of Cold Places

Over the past few years, The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has built some impressive Google Earth files, such as the Wilkins Ice Shelf Collapse.
They’ve now released a project titled “A Climate Change Tour of Cold Places“, which was created as a collaboration with the University of Colorado at Boulder School of Education. The 12 minute tour is narrated, and features a variety of photos and videos along the way. They call it a “tour of the snowy and icy regions of the world covering sea ice, glaciers, ice shelves, and permafrost“.

Climate Change Tour

You can download the KML of the tour here. For details about the data behind the tour, they have a comprehensive data sheet available. For more information, simply visit their site.

Wilkins Ice Shelf Collapse in Google Earth

The news came out just a few days ago that the last remaining bridge of ice connecting two islands in Antarctica disintegrated and the Wilkins Ice Shelf is now just a pile of broken ice. Now, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has released a Google Earth time animation showing satellite photos of the break-up of the Wilkins Ice Shelf over the past few weeks, including the final bridge collapse. You can watch the time animation of the photos of the collapse here (600 Kbytes). After the file loads, just hit the play button in the time slider that appears in the upper left of Google Earth. This and other interesting Google Earth content is available at the NSIDC site.

Wilkins Ice Shelf Collapse in Google Earth

via OgleEarth
Related: Arctic Ice Melting Animation
[UPDATE 22-April: Thanks to some suggestions I made, NSIDC reduced their file size on the above GE File from 17 MBytes to 600K – they liked my suggestions. 🙂 They had full-sized PNGs. I suggested smaller JPG files instead.]

Glacier Melt Survey in Google Earth

Google Earth is probably the best way to view the evidence of dramatic climate change in the form of glaciers. The reasons being that Google Earth has the best collection of satellite and aerial imagery, it has 3D terrain, there are many user-generated photos of the glaciers, and there are many collections of placemarks from scientists showing photos and video evidence of the changes.
Most recently, Google has announced a collections of placemarks from the Extreme Ice Survey project which includes dedicated scientists and extreme photographers who have been placing time lapse cameras around many glaciers and recording the dramatic changes, sometimes in just the course of a few months, of these glaciers which have been around for thousands of years. You can see the collection of placemarks of the Extreme Ice Survey here . Here is an example of the videos found in the collection:


AK-03 Columbia Glacier from Cliff from Extreme Ice Survey on Vimeo.

Google Earth 5 has a feature called historical imagery which lets you see other imagery for the same location. Unfortunately, many of the glaciers in the Extreme Ice Survey do not yet have much in the way of historical images. However, other people have created glacier KML files which show changes over time. See for example this collection by GEC member ‘blt’: Glaciers Melting, another story showing some data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (the NSIDC has lots of Google Earth content).
And, for the most dramatic view of climate change visible in Google Earth, I highly recommend viewing the NSIDC view of ice melting at the arctic and antarctic poles from 1979 to the present.

More Detailed Arctic Ice Melting Animation in Google Earth

Arctic Sea Ice melting in Google EarthThe ice in the Arctic officially reached the summer minimum on September 12th after a blazing summer in the North. The ice reached the second highest minimum in recorded history just a bit less than 2007 where almost half the ice disappeared off the cap of the world. Read the official post from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The NSIDC has produced a number of excellent animations for Google Earth depicting real-time analysis of the amount of ice on both poles over time. Using a demarcation line of the average ice melt extents over the past few decades as a reference, you can compare the current levels and see just how bad the melting has been the last two years.
The NSIDC has now updated their animations with better coverage and twice the resolution of detail. Try the 30-day animation first. If your computer and video card have plenty of memory, then you can try the 60-day or 90-day animations as well. Once you choose one of the files above, and it loads in Google Earth, put your mouse in the upper center to make the time animation slider appear. Then click the “play” button (triangular arrow like you see on a TV remote) to begin the animation. To speed up the animation, click on the “clock” icon on the left of the slider and adjust the “Animation speed” slider. Each frame of the animation has to load once before you can play the animation quickly. It may take a few moments to load all the frames (especially if you pick the 90-day animation).
Here is a video what one of the animations looks like in Google Earth (this was back in August):


You can find the complete list of available NSIDC Google Earth visualizations here.
Related – other Google Earth scientific visualizations:

Popular Science Highlights Scientific Applications of Google Earth

The July issue of Popular Science has a special series of articles highlighting five different scientific visualizations involving the environment using Google Earth. I’m glad to see a popular mainstream magazine giving visibility to visualizations with Google Earth that are not silly scenes found in the satellite photos, but instead show that you can share meaningful scientific and environmental data and make it meaningful. Many of these visualizations were presented at the American Geophysical Union Here’s a quick summary of the five visualizations with links to the respective KML files, the Popular Science article, and links to previous GEB stories on the visualizations:

GE Screenshots

  1. Volcano Tracker – Peter Webley of the University of Alaska’s Volcano Observatory developed tools to help track the ash plumes from volcanos in the Alaskan Ring of Fire. Because of a nearly fatal accident of a commercial airliner which flew into an ash plume, air traffic controllers are relying on tools Peter developed to visualize ash plumes in Google Earth in 3D so they can direct flights away from danger. Peter also developed a GE time animation re-enacting the near-accident of the commercial flight including the ash plume. You can see several examples of Google Earth visualizations on the plumes. See GEB story on this. By the way, special thanks to Peter for E-mailing me about the Popular Science articles.

  2. Storm Trooper – NASA has been using Google Earth to track scientific flights into large tropical storms in real-time with their Real-Time Mission Manager (RTMM) software. Michael Goodman at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center explains that Google Earth enables the planners on the ground to follow flights into storms and help direct them to key areas of interest. “Prior to the RTMM…we couldn’t follow them.” This is one of the most impressive uses of Google Earth for science I’ve seen. GEB wrote about RTMM when they presented at last Fall’s AGU. Here’s a link to the RTMM site (not working at the moment), and here’s a NASA story about the system.

  3. Emotion Map – Next up, Christian Nold gets to tell his story of creating a 3D emotion map in Google Earth. He put “galvanic response” measuring devices on the wrists of 100 volunteers in Greenwhich England and used it to measure their emotions responses as they walked around town. They also had PDAs to record what they were seeing. The resulting visualization in Google Earth is really cool. GEB first wrote about it in February 2006. Here’s a link to the Greenwhich emotion map . If you visit the Biomapping.net site, you’ll find several other cities are getting emotion maps.

  4. Arctic Eye – This article describes the great work by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado who have produced a great array of Google Earth KML files illustrating their scientific results monitoring snow and ice around the world. Walt Meir of the NSIDC was interviewed by Popular Science and he describes several of their visulizations and why they are important to scientists and communicating with the public. Highlighted in the story is the ice melt time animation which shows the extent of ice over time at both poles of the Earth as they melt during the summer. See several GEB stories on NSIDC’s Google Earth work.

  5. Flight of the Bird Flu – Daniel Janies, a professor of zoology at Ohio State University’s department of biomedical informatics describes his visualization with Google Earth to show the spread of the H5N1 avian-flu virus. Their map shows mutation maps of the flu and they are now tracking up to 1000 variations of the flu and can show the data with seasonal variations. You can read more about their project at their web site, and here is a link to the mutation map . And here’s a story from last year on GEB about it. Also of note is the avian flu tracker built by Declan Butler of Nature Magazine.