Thursday marked World Oceans Day, a United Nations effort to “raise global awareness of the challenges faced by the international community in connection with the oceans.”

Getting in the spirit, Google Earth and about a dozen research labs paired their data, talents and technology to create high res maps of seafloor terrain. Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory led the charge contributing its Global Multi-Resolution Topography (GMRT) Synthesis and some 20 years worth of data from 500 ship cruises.

The interactive topo maps they created portray an underwater area bigger than North America. Such visualizations help scientists understand natural and man-made disasters including: tsunami events and runups, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, changes in coastal and deep-ocean sea levels, storm surges and contaminant dispersal, according to the website of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a research participant in this project.

A post on The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory website explained, from what’s already mapped:

“…Scientists have learned much. For instance, researchers can see details of earthquake faults and underwater landslides. Shifts in the seafloor can trigger tsunamis, as shown by this year’s disaster in Japan, and the 2004 wave that swept Sumatra. The sharper imagery helps scientists assess the risk in various regions, including along the U.S.-Canada west coast. The maps also bring erupting mid-ocean ridges into sharper focus and help scientists understand volcanic eruptions on earth, the vast majority of which occur hidden far from view on the ocean floor.”

Other research entities that contributed to the World Oceans Day 2011 seafloor mapping effort with Google Earth include: the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of Hawaii, University of New Hampshire, University of Washington, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Kiel and the Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service of the Chilean Navy.

Even though this group just collectively doubled what had been mapped before, Google estimates that only 5 percent of the world’s ocean floors have been mapped to date. So. There’s far more eye candy to be had! [hat tip: Julia Whitty at Motherjones].

Check out the Google Lat Long blog explaining the project further, or take a video tour of a few of the underwater volcanoes, ridges and mountain ranges as far as 26,000 feet below the surface of the sea.

There’s no way around it: this is pretty neat. This here video shows a bunch of teenagers, from Japan, running a sky-diving simulation using nothing more than Google Earth and a projector+blank mat.

The kids hook up a laptop running Google Earth to a projector, then project the image onto the white space. They’re then suspended over the map and Google Earth is made to zoom through the different zoom levels, giving the sensation of going sky-diving.

Fans are then added to give everything a little bit more realism.

Kidding aside, the latest version is obviously the best one yet. And trees are obviously a hugely important part of the Earth. To get them into Google Earth, the search giant has made 3D models of over 50 different species of trees. And they’ve included over 80 million of them in various places around the world including Athens, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, and Tokyo. They’re also working with some conservation organizations to model threatened forests around the world.

The other big addition to this latest version of Google Earth is Integrated Street View. To be clear, Google has had a form of Street View in Google Earth since 2008, but now it’s fully a part of the experience. This means that you can go all the way from space, right down to Street View seamlessly. That’s because Google has included their Street View mascot/button, Pegman, in the main navigation controls now. Just like in Google Maps, you just pick him up and drop him anywhere highlighted in blue, and you’ll be taken to the detailed Street View.

And you can now fully navigate the Earth using Street View in Google Earth. Simply use your keyboard or mouse to move around.

Google Earth 6 also makes it easier to discover and explore historical imagery. This feature was added in version 5, but it wasn’t easy to find. Now you’ll be able to see when it’s available right at the bottom of the screen.

Google Earth 6 would definitely be Treebeard’s favorite version of Google Earth yet. Check out more in the pictures and videos below.

Google has added weather data to its Google Earth application. As of now, the new feature only supports locations in North America and parts of Europe.

In its blog, Google explains the feature not so much as being a substitute for watching The Weather Channel or visiting a weather Web site so much as it is an extension of the Google Earth experience. You fly about, check out this or that landform, but now you’re able to see if there’s a hurricane in the area, or if maybe there’s a thunderstorm en route.

No, not exactly the most exciting story you’ll see all day, but should be worth checking out when you have a spare moment or two.

Today, Google Earth released a new edition of its desktop app which hikers, runners and cyclists are going to love. They call it Google Earth 5.2. I call it the Hiker;s Edition. One of the new features allows you to recreate the path of a hike or bike ride by ingesting geo-data from one of your GPS devices. The visualizations show you the speed, elevation, and other stats from your hike, which you can see as an animation inside Google Earth.

If you collect other data about your trip, such as your heart rate or other body monitoring stats, those can be overlayed as a graph below at the bottom of the screen. I’d love to see an iPhone or Android fitness app that takes advantage of these new capabilities.

Another new feature in Google Earth is the ability to launch a regular Web browser from within the desktop app. Hopefully, that is the first step towards bringing Google Earth completely from the desktop to the Web. Otherwise, it might end up like Second Life.

Below is a video Google Earth product manager Peter Birch made of his bike ride to work.

If you have Android 1.5 or 1.6, don’t bother. Not to burst your bubble, but your device doesn’t have the resources needed to power such an intensive application. Users reporting the app’s availability have all been Nexus One owners, which means this is a 2.1-only app so far. DROID owners will have to wait for the 2.1 update, which seems to be taking longer than most would have wanted or expected.

There’s nothing official yet from the Google blog, but we’ll be sure to keep you updated when the announcement is official.

[via Android Guys]

One of the most effective ways to battle global warming would be to curb deforestation around the world. Google is helping today on the monitoring front by combining satellite imagery from Google Earth with heavy computational analysis in the cloud. Studying satellite imagery can identify where deforestation is occurring, but serious analysis requires a lot of computational power to compare images over time and locate illegal deforestation activity before it is too late to do anything about it.

The image above, for instance, shows deforestation in Rondonia, Brazil over the last two decades, with recent activity in red. The red spots in the image below show deforestation hot spots in the past 30 days. Google is working in collaboration with scientists who have created software to analyze deforestation activity as seen through satellite imagery. But the desktop computers these scientists typically use can take days to run each analysis. By moving that to more powerful computers in the cloud, Google can reduce that time to seconds while also making available literally petabytes of raw satellite imagery data.

While this prototype service is not publicly available yet, Google plans to give scientists access to it on a not-for-profit basis. Google will generate goodwill from the effort, but more importantly it’s a great marketing example that shows off the power of cloud computing. It’s a proof point for a future Google wants to see come to pass.

Apparently, the reason for the name change is that the booth now displays much more than just Street View. Google has made a modified Google Earth client so that you can go anywhere in the world in the device now. And you can even go to the Moon and Mars with it. “It felt more like a ride than a computer program, something between an observation-deck and a glass-walled spaceship. As a result of this totally seamless, immersive experience, we decided to name it the Liquid Galaxy,” Google writes.

While the company notes that this is still very much a 20% project for them, they are “working hard to improve it.” Hopefully that means two things: 1) Turning it into a Star Trek-style Holodeck. 2) Figuring out how to make it less than 10,000 degrees inside (thanks to all the screen heat).

Below, watch the video we took of the thing from Google I/O this year. Google notes that it’s currently touring around the world at various tech conferences. And they also apparently have a few on their campuses.

Google is launching their version of Sim City today, Google Building Maker. The tool lets you create buildings for Google Earth. Building Maker lets you pick any building and construct a 3D version of it using photos and building blocks provided by Google. Google says that buildings are relatively fast to construct using their tool, taking only a matter of minutes.

Building Maker runs within your web browser and connect with your Google Account so you can get credit for your building. You can also use Google SketchUp to edit or modify your creation.

When your building is finished, you submit it to Google, where it will be deposited in a giant 3D warehouse. If yours is the best version of the building, Google will add it to the 3D building layer in Google Earth. Google Building Maker, which is available in 14 languages, lets you make buildings in only 50 cities at the moment, but will be rolling out the feature to other cities in the future.

While Building Maker is definitely a fun tool, Google gets some benefit out of this. They are crowdsourcing building making to their users, in addition to doing this internally. Google is also crowdsourcing to help update Google Maps, letting users report changes to a particular location, destination or roads.

The leader of Pakistan’s Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, may or may not be dead after a CIA missile hits his father-in-law’s home in the remote “Zangarha area” of the country. But now we can see exactly where that missile hit, and we don’t even need access to a spy satellite. Thanks to Google Earth, we get the image above.

Stefan Geens pinpointed the location on his blog Ogle Earth using location information gathered from news accounts. He also figured out where the supposed burial ground was. A decade ago, only a handful of people would have had access to such satellite imagery. Today, anyone can download it for free. CIA and military satellites are still higher resolution, but it makes you wonder how fast the geo-information gap between governments and citizens is closing.

We’ve also seen recently how the Untied States Holocaust Memorial Museum is using Google Earth to graphically document the ongoing genocide in Darfur. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to hide from Google Earth, which makes us all Big Brother in a sense. That’s a good thing (better us than a single government or corporation).

Unfortunately, Google Earth is only retrospective. You can’t see what is happening across the globe right now. Maybe one dayit will be closer to real time.

Using data from the U.S. State Departments Humanitarian Information Unit and working with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Google now shows more than 3,300 villages (yes, entire villages) that have been decimated during the genocide. Google notes that while the numbers have been known for some time, actually seeing the decimation in more detail than ever before provides a clearer understanding of the devastation.

For example, using the service’s newer historical data feature, you can see before and after pictures of the region. The results are pretty stunning. This feature is available on some 200 of these sites in the region.

All of this data is available in the Global Awareness folder in Google Earth. And Google is urging people to visit the U.S. Holocaust Museum Memorial website to find out more about what you can do to take action about the atrocities in Darfur.

While talk has seemed to die down in recently months about Darfur after the election cycle made it a hot-button issue, it remains a very serious situation. And it’s good that Google is using its long reach to keep the spotlight on it.

This has been quite a week for Google, especially with the announcement of Google Wave at the Google I/O Conference. Not to be ignored, Google Earth has been quietly rolling out some nifty features, including business listings. Today, Google Earth has added 3D tours of buildings, bridges, baseball stadiums and more.

The tours are self-running views into buildings, bridges, museums, skyscrapers, stadiums and castles from around the world, most of which were built Google SketchUp users who model buildings for Google Earth.

To play a tour, you need to activate the “3d Buildings” layer in Google Earth. Then you can click the “Start tour here” link in the “Places” panel in Google Earth (make sure you have download the latest version of Google Earth).

Google Earth has proven to be a powerful and useful tool for combing the Earth.  The virtual-earth application has helped solve a plane crash mystery, was used for a marijuana bust and lets you explore Disneyland Paris. Now, Google Earth is adding something more practical It will let you see businesses and related information on both its desktop and iPhone apps.

By adding a “Businesses” layer to Google Earth, you’ll be able to see businesses by default when you start the application. Google Earth will list businesses like restaurants, bars, banks, gas stations, and grocery stores. As you zoom in further to the map, you’ll see more businesses. When you click on the icons, you’ll get additional information like the address. telephone number, reviews, and hours.

It’s unclear whether Google is using its database of local businesses in Google Maps to power the business listings, but it seems like that’s the case.

Just as it did last year with Disney World, Google Earth now has Disneyland Paris (as it was rebranded to in 1995 following its thud of an opening) rendered in 3D. Disney has provided the program with some 85,000 photos — a huge 450GB worth — to make the renderings as realistic as possible. All the rides are there, the castle and even over 500 landscape elements.

Following its rebranding, and the opening of some new rides, Disneyland Paris was able to somewhat turn things around, but it remains far in debt. Having a virtual representation of your theme park in Google Earth isn’t going to help that. Is it going to convince more people to go visit the park? Unlikely. But it’s a cute distraction for me for about 15 minutes. And it shows how good some of these 3D renderings are getting.

The Disneyland Paris layer can be found in the “Gallery” folder of Google Earth 5.0.

Despite countless time spent searching all the areas in Arizona that authorities and the family thought the plane might have gone down, there had been no luck all this time in finding the plane. Then, something rather incredible happened. A person who had also been involved in the attempts to find millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, found a picture of a forest fire that had been taken the same day as the crash and in what was thought to be a similar area. He alerted the family, which had set up a website to aid in the search. Remarkably, they were able to find the exact area in the picture using the different viewing angles and topographical data of Google Earth.

The family and some volunteers then set out to the area they had pinpointed in the program, using its coordinates. Sure enough, they found the wreckage. While it’s not exactly a happy ending for the families of the two people lost in the crash, Marcy Randolph and William Westover, it does provide closure, Randolph’s family says.

And now the family is hoping to help others do similar types of search and rescue using Google Earth. The family has set up a system called MARSI, which stands for Mapped Archive of Rescue & Search Information. On the website they set up for it, they detail exactly how they were able to use Google Earth’s data to find the missing plane. It’s very interesting stuff. And MAST (The Missing Aircraft Search Team), a team which contributed to the Fossett search, apparently wants to use MARSI for future searches, Liz Johannesen, Marcy Randolph’s cousin, tells us.

These types of stories remind us that while projects like Google Earth may not be the most important to a company’s bottom line, they can provide something much more valuable to a lot of people. Last week, we heard about the woman who got her stolen purse back thanks to Google Latitude. And this week we have this much more important story involving Google Earth. It is nice to see that the technology we sometimes take for granted in a quickly evolving space, actually can help people in a meaningful way.

Below, find some images detailing the search area from Google Maps.

Through a cooperative effort with the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL) and the NOAA National Geophysical Data Center, Google Earth now incorporates detailed bathymetry for the five Great Lakes. Users will be able to explore features such as the canyons and shoals in eastern Lake Superior, the Lake Michigan mid-lake reef complex, and the old river channel, now underwater, that once connected Lakes Michigan and Huron at the Straits of Mackinac.

The NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory has assembled a narrated Google Earth tour, which you can download here. Or you can just check out the Google Gadget embedded in the blog post announcing the addition of the Great Lakes to Google Earth (requires the Google Earth API).

Let us know if you find the lost City of Atlantis in those lakes somewhere.

Earlier this week the Google Earth team released a new plugin that allows users to view Google Earth tours directly from their web browsers. These tours, which were introduced in the 5.0 release of Google Earth in February, allow users to create virtual flythroughs through any location on Google Earth, which can lead to some pretty impressive results. Google has compiled a handful of the best tours in this gallery, which includes a reenactment of the historic Flight 1549 landing in the Hudson and a whirlwind tour through San Francisco.

The plugin weighs in at a hefty 30 MB (80 megabytes after installing on a Mac), so it can hardly be considered lightweight. But the functionality is impressive, and could definitely be used in a variety of innovative ways now that the tours have been freed from the Google Earth desktop client. I image news organizations could use the tours to help liven up online reports (tours can include audio voiceovers), and travel companies could use them to help showcase where their tour packages will take their customers.

UK tabloid The Sun has an article claiming that someone found Atlantis using Google Earth. As someone who’s personally interested in ancient mysteries, paranormal phenomena, and cryptozoology, I’m really happy that a tabloid has this story because it totally gives credence to the idea that Atlantis does, indeed, exist and should definitely silence all the naysayers.

Surely I jest. The evidence is compelling, however; a grid of crisscrossing lines the size of Wales buried three and a half miles underwater is nothing to sneeze at. Remember, mother nature doesn’t make straight lines. Intelligent beings make straight lines. These lines are apparently 620 miles west of Morocco near the Canary Islands.

Most accounts tend to place Atlantis somewhere in or near the Atlantic Ocean, with placement ranging from near the Bermuda Triangle (also see the Bimini Road) all the way to islands in the Mediterranean Sea near Greece and Italy.

To play devil’s advocate, this could be any number of ancient super cities (if you believe in that kind of stuff) – not necessarily Atlantis. Or it could be an anomaly, a hoax, or it might have a reasonable explanation. Speaking of reasonable explanations…

According to a Google spokesperson, the lines are actually sonar artifacts from a boat gathering data for Google Earth’s new ocean feature:

“What users are seeing is an artefact of the data collection process.… Bathymetric (or sea floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea floor.… The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data. The fact that there are blank spots between each of these lines is a sign of how little we really know about the world’s oceans.”

Here’s a link to the spot on Google Maps. Now if we could just get one of those Street View cars made into a submarine capable of going three and a half miles deep, we’d be in business.

UPDATE: Google’s official response…

Is this Atlantis? [The Sun]

The terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year brought any number of technologies “under the microscope”: Twitter can be used by terrorists to coordinate attacks; Google Earth can be used to map out possible attack routes, etc. Too bad Google completely disagrees with this slipshod logic.

That terrorists can use maps, electronic or otherwise, for Evil isn’t Google’s fault, as it explained to The Sydney Morning Herald. Or, specifically:

The evilness is in the philosophies and the desires of those that want to do evil. They will use the tools at hand to do that, whether it’s throwing a Molotov cocktail, or shooting a rifle or using some piece of technology as part of the process.

Yes, it’s like that old Chris Rock joke. Guns don’t kill people, crazy people do.

Post-Mumbai, Google Earth has been called “the Google threat.” Even the venerable British Army has expressed concern about the program!

But I don’t understand how it can. Are we to ban cellphones because, you know, Bad Guy 1 can SMS his location to Bad Guy 2? Or maybe we should shut down Casio for creating the alarm clock that awoke Bad Guy 3 on the day of an attack? It’s silly.