Google Earth: Unbelievably Cool

I think most of us went through a period where we spent hours and hours googling around on Google Maps looking for our fieldsite — I know I did (you can see the Porgera mine’s waste dumps from space). But “Google Earth”:http://earth.google.com/ just made me clap my hands together and giggle like a delighted three year old — something that doesn’t happen to me very often (the last two times were when I installed GTA: San Andreas on my computer and when I purchased a copy of “selected essays by O.H.K. Spate”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0007JG17A/qid=1121033103/sr=1-10/ref=sr_1_10/002-3949094-5952040?v=glance&s=books). I was showing my scarily erudite beloved the “Marovo Lagoon”:http://www.pacificislandtravel.com/solomon_islands/about_destin/new_georgia.html, which is almost as beautiful from space as it is on the ground. When I got to a certain level of specificity the names of the geographical features popped up! Unbelievably cool. It’s one thing to offer a free service with the neighborhoods of London marked out — it’s something else again to tag up the Western Solomon Islands (although the location for Porgera is incorrectly placed and the names of the mountains are hopelessly garbgles, tisk tisk).

Interested in seeing aerial photography of a mine that moves hundreds of thousands of tons of earth everyday? Check out latitutde 5°26’43.18″S longitude 143° 5’21.84″E.

Blog post
Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His book Leviathans at The Gold Mine has been published by Duke University Press. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org

6 thoughts on “Google Earth: Unbelievably Cool”

  3. Google Earth definitely is cool, and I like the interface. Nevertheless I stick with the original, NASA’s world wind—and there are cool addons for the latter, some of ’em lightsaber-related 😉

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  6. That is too much fun! Like Simcity.

    But I noticed something odd. I hovered over Manhattan, and the island was a beautiful grid of buildings. But in downtown Chicago a few skyscrapers stood in different ways.

    And Tokyo, forget it! Buidlings are shooting up left and right, with shadows casted in every which direction. Escher could not have done better!

    How come?

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