Google says it’s the most comprehensive picture of the planet ever made available to the public.

“The images were collected as part of an ongoing joint mission between the USGS and NASA called Landsat,” explains Rebecca Moore, Engineering Manager, Google Earth Engine & Earth Outreach. “Their satellites have been observing earth from space since the 1970s—with all of the images sent back to Earth and archived on USGS tape drives that look something like this example (courtesy of the USGS).”

“We started working with the USGS in 2009 to make this historic archive of earth imagery available online,” she adds. “Using Google Earth Engine technology, we sifted through 2,068,467 images—a total of 909 terabytes of data—to find the highest-quality pixels (e.g., those without clouds), for every year since 1984 and for every spot on Earth. We then compiled these into enormous planetary images, 1.78 terapixels each, one for each year.”

Finally, Google worked with the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon Uinversity to convert the Earth images into HTML5 animations.

The imagery is constructed from millions of satellite images, and is even zoomable. Here are some examples:

Here’s Google’s Timelapse site. Here’s Time’s.

“Today we are celebrating Earth Day with an interactive doodle that captures a slice of nature’s subtle wonders. We hope you enjoy discovering animals, controlling the weather, and observing the seasons. Use the sightseeing checklist below to make sure you do not miss anything!” says Doodler Leon Hong.

Indeed, Google has provided a Doodle checklist. So, click around and have fun.

Earth Day, as we know it, is celebrated on April 22nd. Back in 1969, the first Earth Day was proposed at a UNESCO conference in San Francisco to be celebrated on March 21st. A month or so later, U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson held an additional Earth Day on April 22nd, as an environmental teach-in. In 1990, the April celebration went international, and it is currently celebrated in nearly 200 countries worldwide.

Last year, Google’s Earth Day doodle was also animated, though not quite interactive. The doodle was a time lapse photo of flowers blooming and eventually forming the Google logo.

 There is a cliche that many people often share about history, and how it is written by the victors. The conquerors across the world, for the most part, are the ones who transcribed the history for others to read. We have terms like "revisionist history" to account for the fact that we realize the truth may be quite a bit grayer than those historical accounts we read lead us to believe. And it is often the sole dissenting voice that points us toward what the true history may be – some in between version where the good guys are perhaps not quite so good, and the bad guys not so bad.

It is easy to think of these shades of history while traveling in Greece (where I spent the past week), because the evidence of this is all around. From the city of Acropolis high over Athens to the softly smoldering volcanic remains in the caldera of Santorini. What was once religion is now called mythology, a sign perhaps that our religion of today may befall the same fate. Amongst those ruins of temples and palaces, there is the beautifully frustrating knowledge that we will probably never know what these really looked like or how these people truly lived.

The history today will be different. With technology and social media, we have the effortless ability to capture our individual truth and experience in minute detail and save it on shared servers for the world to access hundreds or thousands of years from now. Ironically, this fact may make the study of history that much more complicated, as historians in the future will have many versions of truth to study and contrast. Rather than piecing this history together through buried bone fragments and stones with the rare written account as they have done for many years, they will do it through compiling and sorting data, analyzing imagery and watching video.

Combined with global historical initiatives such as the Internet Archive and Google Earth, the portrait of our world as it stands today will be far more complete and multi-experienced for historians of the future than any other age that has come before. For those of us who write blogs or upload photos, the scope of our actions are easy to forget or minimalize. But we are the new historians of our time and our content will one day be history – and probably for more than just ourselves. It’s a humbling to imagine your own words on this scale … particularly when you think of who could be reading them a long time from now.

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Here’s what you can do with Google Earth on your iCandy iPhone:

• Tilt your iPhone to adjust your view to see mountainous terrain
• View the Panoramio layer and browse the millions of geo-located photos from around the world
• View geo-located Wikipedia articles
• Use the ‘Location’ feature to fly to your current location
• Search for cities, places and business around the globe with Google Local Search

It’s free, so you have no excuse for trying it out.

PS. This post comes via the Admirals Club at LAX. I still have about 12 more hours of traveling today, but will be back up to speed tomorrow.

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New features include the ability to embed Google Earth into Web sites, create lines, polygons, and placemarks in 3D. Users can also convert existing Maps API sites to 3D Earth, add or view buildings in 3D, and use Google Sky’s high-resolution images.

"The Google Maps API, with over 150,000 developer sites, and the Google Earth client, with over 400 million downloads, are both tremendously successful tools to help users visualize this Geoweb of content," said Google.

"Now that we have brought the Google Earth API to the developer community, we can only imagine what wonderfully creative new web applications will be developed."
 

Although the military rulership of Myanmar, still called Burma by many countries, isn’t the most open of governments, their borders are as open as any to satellites.

Fortunately for relief efforts in the wake of the Myanmar cyclone disaster, the government’s continued refusal to grant visas to relief workers isn’t hindering Google from trying to help. The search advertising company showed on its LatLong blog a new layer for Google Earth that shows where to find all of the known healthcare centers (as of a 2002 survey) in the country.

The new layer, developed by Direct Relief International, may be downloaded by any Google Earth client:

We color-coded the sites by the capacity of the facility so that you can visually differentiate between larger hospitals, specialized medical units, and clinics/rural health centers.

By combining layers showing the governmental and nongovernmental health facilities that we work with, and the physical impact, we can focus our response on those points of access to healthcare that are serving the most affected communities. Using this geospatial information in conjunction with situation reports from the field enables us to more efficiently target our assistance.

Google also set up a cyclone relief donations page, backed by its Checkout service. Visitors may donate to Direct Relief International and to Unicef from the page to help relief efforts.

On the Google LatLong Blog, Qiushuang (Autumn) Zhang writes, "Reno, Nevada has been shaking things up the past few weeks with a series of frequent earthquakes.  The Reno Gazette-Journal has been keeping tabs on the activity with a My Map they’ve put on their website."

 Google Map Of Quakes

Given how unpredictable earthquakes have historically been, any map might be considered worthless.  Only this one appears to point to something.  Zhang notes, "Looking at this map is pretty interesting, because the pattern of the earthquakes looks like it’s following a faultline.  I’ve also been keeping an eye on the action with the USGS real-time earthquakes Mapplet and Google Earth layer."

Hopefully there won’t be any more earthquakes, making this a moot point.  The development at least goes to show what a go-to resource Google has become in disasters, though, with fires, floods, and hurricanes in its past.

Also – and we probably wouldn’t point this out if the earthquakes had caused any injuries or damage – using Google Maps to cover a disaster seems like a good way for people and newspapers to get a link from Google LatLong.

Deepest Canyon on Earth
(Photo Credit: Google Earth Blog)

The collection includes the windiest place on Earth, the snowiest place on Earth and the largest natural feature on the planet to name just a few. The collection is called the "Extreme Series" and was created by someone using the pseudonym "satishgsk."

Taylor writes, "Once you load the Extreme Series  each placemark shows the location, and often contains a photo showing more details of each sight. You may also want to check out satishgsk’s post which includes bigger photos and information."

He also offers tips for viewing the Extreme Series. "You can select the Extreme Series folder and hit the "Play" button (looks like the play button on a TV remote) below the Places pane to watch a flying tour of each location."

"Go to the ‘Tools->Options’ (or "Preferences" on the Mac) and select ‘Touring->Show Balloon when Tour is Paused’ to have it automatically show the balloons during the tour playback. You also might want to adjust the "Tour Pause" speed to give more time to read the balloons."

It is a nice collection of the unusual and is worth checking out even if you have only a mild interest in such things.
 

 Google Cities 3D Page

On the Google LatLong Blog, Bruce Polderman announced the launch of the Google Cities in 3D Program.  "Prior to today, local governments could publish 3D building models to Google Earth via the Google 3D Warehouse," he noted.  "This new program expands on that approach and provides a more direct and efficient means of publishing larger datasets to Google Earth."

All right, then.  On to why officials should spend time doing so.  "A 3D model of a city is extremely useful to potential visitors, developers, investors, preservationists, property owners, businesses, public officials, and many other groups," according to Polderman.  "By establishing a 3D representation of a city on Google Earth, local governments can more effectively engage the public and boost tourism by enabling prospective visitors to plan their visit in advance."

Or not.  In regards to that last reason: if our history books (and family photo albums) are correct, people occasionally visited other places before Google Earth ever came into existence.  And even in the modern world, lots of things get accomplished without it.

We’ll forgive Google this appeal to the ultra-practical, though.  With any luck, the company’s goals will get accomplished, and we’ll gain realistic models of various cities.

Less than a month ago, the LatLong Blog promoted a series of tutorial videos and lesson plans involving Google Earth.  Now the blog‘s at it again, although Adelia Barber, a doctoral student at UC Santa Cruz, has become the specific spokesperson.

    Adelia Barber – The     Doak Lab

After detailing her use of the program for research, Barber writes, "I’ve also found that Google Earth is great in the classroom.  While teaching an introductory biology class, I decided to replace an outdated library assignment with a virtual plant ecology search mission.  Want to test your own knowledge?  Head to Google Earth to look up the following locations and take a stab at answering some of my questions."

Questions include, "Judging by the characteristics of the trees, what time of year do you think the picture was taken over Central Park in Manhattan?"  Also, "John Muir described a few trees growing on the top of Half Dome in Yosemite Valley when he visited there in the mid-1800s.  Are there any trees still growing on the top of Half Dome?"

As before, we’ve got to admit that this is fairly interesting stuff, if a little Google-centric.  Finally, in the event teachers want to speed up their own Google Earth-using sites, a separate post on the LatLong Blog is promoting the new Static Maps API.  "The snapshot map loads fast, making it ideal for content-heavy and multimedia-rich pages," according to Jeffrey Martin.