Google Rules the Waves

John Hanke, the entrepreneur who started what is now Google Earth, has slowly been taking over the universe.  He already had the earth in glorious detail.  Now he’s added Mars and the heavens and — correcting one minor oversight — the world beneath the ocean surface. Download version 5.0 of Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/), start to play with it, and you’ll find you can "fly" under the sea, with the ocean floor beneath you conforming to the best maps that exist (recall that only a small percentage of the sea floor has been mapped in detail).  Fly overhead, and you’ll find various icons — a National Geographic logo, for instance, means you can find detailed information about the state of the oceans…and if you click in the right places, the earth’s globe may turn, say, into a false-color map of distribution of chlorophyll in the sea water. John Hanke, the entrepreneur who founded Keyhole, the earth-observing software company that was bought by Google and became Google Earth, blogs about the launch HERE.  And he concedes he had to be talked into the expansion by Sylvia Earle, the ocean scientist.  As she describes a meeting with Hanke three years ago, (look HERE) she complained that he left out three-quarters of the planet.  “My children, my grandchildren think it is great to see their backyard, fly through the Grand Canyon, visit other countries,” I said. “But, John, when are you going to finish it? You should call Google Earth ‘Google Dirt’." NOAA, NASA, the Navy, and many other institutions pitched in, and as you drag your cursor around, you’ll realize there’s a ton of data there on which a lot of people have worked very hard.  And there’s more.  Look, for instance, for a tiny icon near the top of the screen that looks like the planet Saturn.  Wrong planet — it’s a pull-down menu, offering you "Earth," "Sky," and "Mars."  Yep, not content with this planet, they’ve moved on to others.  Mars’ topography (sorry, no oceans) is derived mostly from the high-resolution images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the spacecraft that arrived in 2006 and carried a camera good enough to see the Mars rovers from above.  If you find the rovers in Gusev Crater or Meridiani Planum — or any of the several other probes that have landed since 1976 — you’ll find panoramas they shot, their paths over the Martian surface, and other details. But back down to earth…and below.  Off Cape Hatteras, I easily found the wreck of the USS Monitor, the Civil War ironclad (I did stories about it in 2002), complete with YouTube video of the undersea remains.  And south of Newfoundland, I poked around and an anchor icon told me I had come upon "Titanic, RMS." Stand warned, though.  If you go to the controls in the upper left of Google Earth, and in the "fly to" window you type "Titanic," the program will still take you to the tiny town of Titanic, Oklahoma.