Every day Google celebrates a famous person or event and today they honor Nicolas Steno, one of the early pioneers of geology. The doodle features rock layers spelling GOOGLE and when they are clicked it does a google search for “Nicolas Steno”. Check it out, it will be gone tomorrow.
A New Jersey homeowner’s property adjoins a popular state park and Google Maps shows her driveway as the entrance to the park. The result has been a flood of visitors entering her driveway and ignoring “no trespassing” signs. Her attempts to have the map corrected have been unsuccessful.
“Upon first glance, his maps contain the typical landmarks we’ve become accustomed to seeing on Yahoo or Google Maps. If you look a little closer, you’ll see the maps are also pulsing with images of moving cars and scenes of bustling people, all in real time.” Quoted from the National Science Foundation news release.
Google and SolarCity, a rooftop solar power company, have announced a $280 million investment deal that will lease solar power systems to thousands of homeowners in multiple states.
Google Earth now has high resolution maps of the seafloor that show submarine canyons, underwater volcanoes, faults, oceanic ridges and many other features.
NASA has produced a KML file that will allow you to explore planet Mercury with Google Earth. All you have to do is download Google Earth, if you don’t already have it, download the KML file, open the KML file and turn off Earth layers. Google Earth will display lots of icons that you can click to learn about the features of Mercury’s surface.
The Google Earth blog has an image of an area in Brazil that received about ten inches of rain in a single day. The result was an amazing density of landslides that reportedly killed nearly 1000 people.
This is not a new video, however it does a nice job of presenting the concept of enhanced geothermal systems for reliable baseload continuous power that can be generated with very few emissions. Perhaps the most important point made in the video is the size of the potential geothermal resource (14,000,000 exajoules) compared to current needs (100 exajoules). The supply is close to unlimited.
Here is a website where you can view and print as many USGS topographic maps as you want for free. You can also switch back and forth between Google Maps and Google satellite images.
Digital-Topo-Maps.com is affiliated with Geology.com.
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