More than two-thirds of Earth is covered by oceans. If you drained all of that water away, you’d see huge basins that have never been explored, an undiscovered planet in our own backyard.
The update covers ocean topography from all over the globe and reveals our most accurate view of the seafloor to date. This new detail comes from spacecraft measurements of bumps and dips in the ocean surface as well as shipboard soundings from surveys carried out by over 40 countries. With this update to ocean terrain data in Google Earth, 15 percent of the seafloor is now available at 1 km resolution.
You may remember a Sun article reporting the discovery of a street grid where it’s believed the lost city of Atlantis would have been located off the West Coast of Africa. The discovery turned out to be a data artifact related to the way data was collected from a ship sailing back and forth to survey an unknown area. This recent seafloor update has been improved to blend better, and “Atlantis” has again disappeared into legend.
Previous terrain data showed what appeared to be a city grid on the ocean floor (left), which was confused for the lost city of Atlantis. Updated data more accurately reflects the seafloor terrain (right).
(Click on image to enlarge)
Another place you’ll notice an improvement in the ocean terrain data is the Mediterranean Sea, particularly south of Cyprus, where the boundary between the Eurasian and Arabian plates is now more clearly defined.
The Mediterranean Sea: before (left) and after (right)
(Click on image to enlarge)
Our last example shows improvements to the land-sea mask along the coastline of Guam. You’ll notice a dramatic improvement in the resolution of both the coastline and neighboring Mariana’s Trench, the deepest trench in the world.
Guam and Mariana’s Trench before (left) and after (right)
(Click on image to enlarge)
In order to make this update possible, our partners at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD have curated 30 years of data from more than 8,000 ship cruises and 135 different institutions. If you’d like to get a closer look at these changes, watch our video tour of this new terrain.
We hope you enjoy diving deeper than ever in Google Earth!
(Cross-posted on the Small Business Blog.)
When we initially announced the Business Photos pilot program, we wanted to give business owners an easy way to get customers in the door online using interactive, high-quality, 360-degree images of places on Google Maps and on Google Search results. With thousands of businesses under our belt — from salons to gift shops — we’ve been hearing the same question again and again from both business owners and photographers alike: How can I participate? Well, with the overwhelming success of the first pilot, we’ve decided to unveil a complementary initiative that will help us reach more interested business owners, more quickly: Trusted Photographers.
Click and drag to view the inside of Spice Market, New York City.
It’s simple. Visit our new website and search for a Google Trusted Photographer in your area. Either email or call a photographer in your area to schedule a time and agree on a price that you will pay the photographer for a photoshoot of your business. This self-serve model makes for easier scheduling and quicker turnaround, while also supporting the local photographers in your community. During the hour it should take for the shoot, you can collaborate with the photographer about how best to display and capture your business. When finished, the photographer will upload the images to Google, and shortly thereafter, you’ll see 360-degree panoramic views of your business on Google.com, Google Maps and on your Google Places listing.
See how Business Photos has helped Toy Joy of Austin, Texas.
Trusted Photographers are available in 14 U.S. cities, as well as in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and France. Don’t see a photographer in your area? Let us know, as that will help us determine where more Trusted Photographers are needed.
We’re taking bird’s eye view to a whole new level with the latest version of Google Earth, released today. With Google Earth 6.2, we’re bringing you the most beautiful Google Earth yet, with more seamless imagery and a new search interface. Additionally, we’ve introduced a feature that enables you to share an image from within Google Earth, so you can now simply and easily share your virtual adventures with family and friends on Google+.
A seamless globe
The Google Earth globe is made from a mosaic of satellite and aerial photographs taken on different dates and under different lighting and weather conditions. Because of this variance, views of the Earth from high altitude can sometimes appear patchy.
Today, we’re introducing a new way of rendering imagery that smoothes out this quilt of images. The end result is a beautiful new Earth-viewing experience that preserves the unique textures of the world’s most defining geographic landscapes—without the quilt effect. This change is being made on both mobile and desktop versions of Google Earth. While this change will appear on all versions of Google Earth, the 6.2 release provides the best viewing experience for this new data.
Grand Canyon before and after
Sri Lanka before and after
Share your explorations with Google+ Google Earth is a great way to virtually explore the globe, whether revisiting old haunts or checking out a future vacation spot. With the Google Earth 6.2 update, we’ve added the option to share a screenshot of your current view in Google Earth through Google+. If you’ve already upgraded to Google+, you can share images of the places you’ve virtually traveled to with your Circles, such as family, friends or your local hiking club. To try this new feature, simply sign in to your Google Account in the upper right hand corner of Google Earth and click “Share.” Images of mountains, oceans, deserts, 3D cities, your favorite pizza shop on Street View—you can now experience all these amazing places around the world with people on Google+.
Search improvements We’ve also made some updates to the search feature in Google Earth. Aside from streamlining the visual design of the search panel, we’ve enabled the same Autocomplete feature that’s available on Google Maps. We’ve also introduced search layers, which will show all the relevant search results (not just the top ten), so now, when looking for gelato in Milano, you can see all the tasty possibilities. Finally, we’ve added biking, transit and walking directions, so if you’re itching for a change of scenery or looking for a new route for your regular commute, you can now use Google Earth to generate and visualize all your options.
If you’re looking for new ways to get around for fun or to work, or might be trying to live a greener lifestyle in 2012, why not try biking? In March 2010 we introduced biking directions and since then Google Maps has been sharing biking directions with cyclists across the U.S and Canada.
Since no bike path is the same, many users have requested an easier way to differentiate the different types of bike routes that are available. Starting today, a new legend feature can help you understand what the different colors on the bike maps symbolize.
Dark green is for dedicated trails and paths
Light green is for roads with dedicated lanes
Dotted green is for roads that are friendly for cyclists
Look for the biking legend in the upper right hand corner of the map
You can view this legend by clicking on the widget in upper right corner of Google Maps and selecting the Bicycling layer. You can also access biking directions on your Android device or by going to maps.google.com on your mobile browser.
Whether you want to drive, take transit, walk or even bike, Google Maps can help you get around. To see how it works on your Android phone take a tour here.
Posted by Dave Kim, Product Marketing Manager, Google Maps
Today marks the launch of a new Google Crisis Response project: Google Public Alerts, a platform designed to bring you relevant emergency alerts when and where you’re searching for them.
If a major weather event is headed for your area, you might go online to search for the information you need: What’s happening? Where and when will it strike? How severe will it be? What resources are available to help?
The Google Crisis Response team works on providing critical emergency information during crises. Our goal is to surface emergency information through the online tools you use everyday, when that information is relevant and useful.
If you click through to “more info” on this alert, you’ll find a page showing more details about the alert, with the full description from the alert publisher, in this case the National Weather Service, a link to their site and other useful information.
Whether you see an alert depends on which alerts are active at a given location, their severity, and your search query. If you’re interested in seeing all of the active alerts in one place, visit our homepage at www.google.org/publicalerts. This page also provides a link to more information on our new platform and gives instructions to interested organizations who want to make their emergency data available through this tool.
We’re learning as we go and we’re working hard to continuously improve the range and relevance of the content you see, so we’d really like your feedback. Please send feedback our way using the link at the far right of our Google Public Alerts homepage.
We hope Google Public Alerts provides you with information to make better decisions in times of crisis.
Tourism to South Korea is on the rise, with neighbors from East Asia and beyond making trips to see the birthplace of Korean dramas and K-Pop, sample authentic kimchee, and find cutting-edge fashions in the capital’s Myeongdong shopping district. Today we’re introducing Street View imagery for the two biggest cities, Seoul and Busan, making it even easier for travelers to plan their next visit to South Korea using Google Maps.
For example, you can preview your vacation in Seoul by starting right in Gwanghwamun square. Viewing the surroundings and statue of naval commander Yi Sun-sin provides a sense of the city’s unique intersection of modern and traditional.
In the southern seaside city of Busan, famous for its film festival, view the water from Namhang Bridge and then the woody romance of Dalmaji Road, famous as a spot for couples to view the moon at night.
We’re thrilled to release this new street-level imagery and hope it helps tourists — both real and virtual — better find their way to Korea’s great destinations. We also look forward to bringing more Street View coverage to Korea over the coming year.
The second 45° imagery update of 2012 includes new imagery for 17 U.S. and 7 international locations in Google Earth and Google Maps.
Ulm is a university town in southern Germany, located at the Danube river. One of the most famous buildings in this town is the Ulm Minster in Gothic style which measures more than 160 meters in height. Climbing the 768 steps to the top platform, visitors will see a breathtaking panoramic view of the Alps on clear days.
In the southern hemisphere, we’ve published imagery of Porto Alegre in the very south of Brazil. It has more than one million inhabitants. The many parks in Porto Alegre makes this city one of the most beautiful in all of Latin America.
Editor’s Note:Today’s guest author is Ari Daniel Shapiro from Atlantic Public Media (APM), a non-profit public media organization in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. APM was the recipient of a Google Earth Outreach Developer Grant, funded through the Google Inc. Charitable Giving Fund at the Tides Foundation. We’re excited to showcase how Atlantic Public Media has weaved Google Earth and KML tours into engaging stories about the diversity of life.
Life gets around. Tiny Arctic Terns soar from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and back, in a single year. A kind of sea algae known as “sea grapes” roam from Australia to the Mediterranean as stowaways, and then promptly conquer their new home.
As a radio producer, I’m used to telling these kinds of stories with audio, weaving together interview tape, ambient sound, and narration. For the last two years, I’ve worked with Atlantic Public Media and the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) to produce an audio series entitled One Species at a Time. Each episode pays homage to a different organism that gallops or creeps or pulses on our planet. We collaborate on these stories with Marie Studer, the EOL’s Learning and Education Director, who has championed our podcast as way to make the natural world come alive and generate excitement amongst people who want to learn about it and explore.
While our podcast and public radio programming brought these tales of the natural world to listeners all over the planet, we always look for ways to tell these stories better and share them more widely. Eduardo Garcia Milagros, a biologist and KML developer in Spain, approached us last year with the idea to use Google Earth as a platform for these mini-documentaries. Brimming with enthusiasm, he shared “When I first opened Google Earth, I went to see my hometown. Once I started exploring KML capabilities, I realized that Google Earth can be an amazing educational tool, especially when you have a good story.” Inspired by his excitement, we decided to identify species whose stories could really be best illustrated through a map, such as the Arctic Tern’s annual migration.
Incorporating Google Earth into our narratives proved to be an interesting challenge for me and Jay Allison, my editor on the project and the Executive Director of APM. We wanted to make the most of the map as a medium to bring to life the tale of the Arctic Tern and other species for viewers. By integrating geographic animation and imagery from all over the world with the audio and images from contributing scientists, we were able to support and enhance the story. For example, in the sea algae tour below, we circle the globe to the Amazon rainforest to illustrate a phenomenon in the ecology of the Mediterranean.
These tours combine voice, sound, images, video, and data-driven animations to explain how two creatures have been able to travel so much of our planet. Coming from a public radio documentary background, we tend to approach things from a purely narrative or poetic angle, but Google Earth tours allow for audio/visual dialogue as well. The movement isn’t purely in the story. The map can become part of a “conversation,” and we’re just beginning to explore the possibilities.
We hope to produce more of these Biodiversity on the Move tours in the future; we’d like to hear what you think of them and what we can improve next time. Drop us a line on the Encyclopedia of Life blog.
Posted by Ari Daniel Shapiro, Atlantic Public Media and the Encyclopedia of Life
Today the World Bank and Google announced a collaborative agreement aimed at improving disaster preparedness and development efforts in countries around the world.
Under this agreement, the World Bank will act as a conduit to make Google Map Maker source data more widely and easily available to government organizations in the event of major disasters, and also for improved planning, management, and monitoring of public services provision.
The free, web-based mapping tool called Google Map Maker enables citizens to directly participate in the creation of maps by contributing their local knowledge. Once approved, those additions are then reflected on Google Maps and Google Earth for others around the world to see.
The Google Map Maker data includes detailed maps of more than 150 countries and regions, and identifies locations like schools, hospitals, roads, settlements and water points that are critical for relief workers to know about in times of crisis. The data will also be useful for planning purposes, as governments and their development partners can use the information to monitor public services, infrastructure and development projects; make them more transparent for NGOs, researchers, and individual citizens; and more effectively identify areas that might be in need of assistance before a disaster strikes.
Community mapper in Kampala, Uganda
World Bank partner organizations, which include government and United Nations agencies, will be able to contact World Bank offices for possible access to the Google Map Maker data for their various projects. World Bank country offices in Kenya, South Sudan, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Zambia, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Moldova, Mozambique, Nepal, and Haiti plan to pilot the Map Maker agreement.
The World Bank Institute (WBI) and the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) will manage the World Bank’s involvement in the collaboration, building on previous joint mapping efforts. For example in April 2011, members of the Southern Sudanese Diaspora participated in a series of community mapping events organized by World Bank and Google to create comprehensive maps of schools, hospitals and other social infrastructure in this new country via Map Maker technology.
Google has enjoyed a strong relationship with World Bank for many years. As indicated by the World Bank Vice President for the Africa Region Obiageli Ezekwesili, “Today’s technology can empower civil society, including the diaspora, to collaborate and support the development process. This collaboration is about shifting the emphasis from organizations to people, and empowering them to solve their own problems and develop their own solutions using maps.”
It’s a new year and what better way to usher it in than with new aerial and satellite imagery published by the Google Earth and Maps Imagery Team! In this post, we’ll explore several international features captured in this latest update.
Our first example is part of an aerial image acquired last August of the central park grounds, fountain, and wasserturm (water tower) of Mannheim, Germany. Mannheim is the city where Karl Benz built and tested the world’s first automobile.
Mannheim Water Tower, Mannheim, Germany
Our next aerial example, also acquired last August, shows the water parks of Linz, Austria, adjacent to the Danube River. The park makes up part of the “Kulturmeile” (“culture mile”) that includes museums and concert halls.
Sun and water bathers, Linz, Austria
The satellite image below shows the medieval grounds and structures of one of the oldest castles in the world, the Citadel of Aleppo in Syria. The citadel sits on a large hill that has been in use since the 3rd millenium BC, and is outlined by perimeter walls and a foundation that reaches 50 meters in height.
Citadel of Aleppo, Syria
This next satellite image highlights a section of the Great Wall of China in Badaling, Yanqing County, China. This site is the most visited section of the wall, and hosted U.S. President Nixon and Vice Premier Li Xiannian during Nixon’s historic visit to China.
Section of the Great Wall of China in Badaling, Yanqing County, China
Lastly, shown below is a satellite image of the National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center, in Dong, Taiwan. Shown at bottom center is the partially built circular Taiwan Photon Source facility, due to be completed in 2013.
National Synchrotron Radiation Center, Dong, Taiwan
If you’d like to receive an email notification when the Google Earth and Maps Imagery team updates your favorite site(s), we’ve got just the tool: The Follow Your World application!
These are only a few examples of the types of features that can be seen and discovered in our latest batch of published imagery. Happy exploring!
High resolution aerial updates: USA: Baton Rouge, LA; Brady, TX; Downieville, CA; East Bay, CA; El Paso, TX; Greenwood, MS; Greenwood, SC; Kingman AZ; Level Land, TX; Long View, TX; Lufkin, TX; Ozona, TX; Quincy, CA; Radium Springs, NM; San Angelo, TX
Countries/regions receiving high resolution satellite updates: Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belarus, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Canada, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, China, Colombia, Comoros, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Finland, France, French Polynesia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Greenland, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lesotho, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Marshall Islands, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nepal, New Zealand, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Republic of Korea, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Slovakia, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Svalbard, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, West Bank, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe
These updates are now available in both Google Maps and Google Earth. For a complete picture of where we updated imagery, download this KML for viewing in Google Earth.
