A young American lady, Katie Spotz, has just started to row across the Atlantic Ocean on her own. Why? Katie, 22 years old, hopes to raise $30,000 for Blue Planet Run and give clean water to 1,000 people by doing this!
Katie just pushed off from Senegal yesterday and is on her way. She hopes to make the 2,500-mile journey in just over 100 days. The map above shows her progress up until now (updated every 20 minutes on her twitter page by Google Earth).
Apparently, she really will not see another human being for the entire trip (although she is sure to have bird visitors — her first one photographed in the picture below). She has not been rowing for long, but apparently she is not new to such adventures.
You can now explore the Amazon, Madagascar, and Sebangau National Forest in Borneo through Google Earth.
On September 25, I wrote about a Google Earth tour (narrated by AL Gore) and new Google Earth tools and layers which help people to look at the possible effects of climate change under three different scenarios. Now, three new tours have been launched that allow the exploration of critical rainforests and real-life success stories.
The tours (embedded below) have a great wealth of information and inspirational stories bound into succinct Google Earth or YouTube videos.
A new tool in Google Earth shows you the “effect” of climate change in your area.
Using Google Earth, you can look at climate effects under three different scenarios — 1) Confronting Climate Change — “with Al Gore”, 2) IPCC High Emissions Scenario, and 3) IPCC Low Emissions Scenario. Other new tools let you examine other aspects of climate change and how to adapt to climate change.
You might think that renewable energy developers have few problems convincing towns to let them move in. But things can get surprisingly tricky when it comes to wildlife protection, according to a new map from the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Audubon Society. The Google Maps mash-up shows which renewable energy project locations are likely to provoke a fight based on the location of wilderness areas, areas where roads are banned, national parks, wildlife refuges, areas under consideration for wilderness protection, and areas that lack legal protection but contain endangered species.
The common toad is becoming much less common in England due to a sharp increase in traffic- and road-related deaths, but with the help of Google Earth, some conservationists hope to reverse the trend.
Froglife, an amphibian conservation group, has mapped 700 crossings throughout the United Kingdom with a tweaked Google Earth application. The data returns live results on toad fatalities and crossings so that the group can notify the public of areas where the animals tend to cross.
While deforestation is clearly visible from satellite imagery, selective logging of rainforests is much harder to track. A team of some of the best scientists across the world have developed estimates of the severity of human logging in tropical regions, but say they really have no idea how accurate they are.
At today’s symposium “Will the Rainforests Survive? New Threats and Realities in the Tropical Extinction Crisis” at the Smithsonian Institution, Gregory Asner from the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology explained the results of an extensive study on the extent of rainforest destruction worldwide.
Geared towards raising awareness of endangered ocean habitats, a new online tool allows viewers an in-depth peek at underwater reefs around the world.
Google Earth has taken us up and out into the universe, and now they are taking us down and under the surface of the sea. The new Google Earth ‘layer’ will allow people to experience a ‘virtual dive’ under the water at sensitive ocean areas all around the world.
With a click of the mouse, viewers will be able to access video streams, photo galleries, conservation strategies and local stories specific to that spot. Conservationists working in partnership with Google Inc. unveiled the new technology at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) world congress in Barcelona.
It seems as though right now the underwater Google plugin is only available for Windows, but I imagine a Mac version won’t be far behind.
‘Intelligent’ elephants in Africa are getting tech-savvy and are using cellphone text messages to report their own encroachment on farms in a novel experiment local conservationists believe will help avoid human-wildlife conflict.
Rangers at a wildlife conservancy in Kenya are getting accustomed to blips on their phones each time an elephant attempts to cross a virtual ‘fence’ that triggers an automatic text signal using Google Earth software.
AP reports that SIM cards on elephants’ global positioning system (GPS) collars beam messages to rangers on duty whenever they approach the “geo-fence” that mirrors the 90,000 acre Ol Pejeta Conservatory’s boundaries. The rangers then use spotlights to frighten the elephants back inside the protected area.
The Environmental Protection Agency has released an interactive Google Earth-based database which pinpoints energy development opportunities on contaminated properties.
According to Biofuels Digest, the EPA’s site shows opportunities for solar, wind and biomass benefits, by combining Google Earth visuals with the database list of places that show promise for progress.
The “Renewable Energy on Contaminated Land and Mining Sites” Web page gives interested parties tools to see what’s possible and where. For example, someone interested in building a community wind farm might want to view the “EPA Tracked Sites with Community Wind Energy Generation Potential” map.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released a Google Earth-based interactive website that pinpoints opportunities for solar, wind or biomass siting on contaminated properties. The site combines the Google Earth platform with an EPA database that lists each property’s attributes for renewable energy development.
According to the EPA, many lands tracked by the agency, such as large Superfund sites, and mining sites offer thousands of acres of land, and may be situated in areas where the presence of wind and solar structures are less likely to be met with aesthetic, and therefore political, opposition.
This week from our friends at ZapRoot: The FDA needs to have their heads examined. We respond to the numerous Chinese comments. Explore the world through Google Earth’s Environment section.
