Abstract

As a visualization tool for Earth Sciences data and imagery one big advantage of virtual globes is they give the user a tremendous amount of control over how the imagery is viewed. Features like zoom, orientation and tilt provide a great deal of flexibility for looking at the imagery in different ways. For the National Snow and Ice Data Center's entry into the Google Earth outreach gallery we chose data that would benefit from capabilities Google Earth provides. We looked for imagery that showed visually dramatic evidence of climate change. Included in the kmz are repeat photographs of glaciers in Alaska taken several decades apart, an animation of the last 29 years of the Arctic sea ice minimum, and an animation of the 2002 break-up of the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica.