Virtual Globes in Science
 

Short Course: Exploring Earth through a Virtual Globe
Geological Society of America
103rd Cordilleran Section Meeting
3 May 2007
Bellingham, WA

The last decade has seen significant developments in the field of Virtual Globes; satellite images overlain on a digital elevation model of the Earth, through which a user can navigate. These 3D geobrowsers offer a new means to organize and display any forms of data with geographical components. They are quickly becoming the new paradigm for earth science education, logistics, and data access.

In 2004 Google acquired a company called Keyhole Inc., which had developed a virtual globe program called "Earth Viewer". Subsequently renamed and made available as a free download product, "Google Earth" (GE) was officially launched on 28 June 2005. With its established clientele base, world-wide name recognition and user-friendly interface, GE is currently the best known and most used Virtual Globe. It has introduced many to the concept of Virtual Globes for the first time.

This short course will present the concept of Virtual Globes using Google Earth as an example of the possible capabilities. Other Virtual Globes will be briefly discussed but demonstrations will concentrate on the abilities of GE, using examples of current applications to research by the Earth Science community. Topics covered will include; basic components and navigation controls, functions integrated into the program interface, and the ability to develop user-defined functions using KML (Keyhole Markup Language), the functional language utilized by Google Earth.

This short course is intended for those with little or no experience of Google Earth who are interested in using it as scientific or educational tool. No previous experience/knowledge of computer programming, satellite data or working with Virtual Globes is required.
 

Conveners

John E. Bailey
Arctic Region Supercomputing Center
jbailey(at)gi.alaska.edu

Jackie Caplan-Auerbach
Western washington University
jackie(at)geol.wwu.edu