Monday, February 2, 2009

Google Earth 5.0 taps Woods Hole for ocean data

By Mass High Tech staff

Google Inc. has launched the latest version of its Google Earth product, and a local organization is providing the California company with ocean data and images, including 3-D underwater terrain.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is among the various ocean-focused organization that are providing version 5.0 of Google Earth with data, enabling a new feature that allows users of Google Earth to dive beneath the water surface and browse ocean-related content. The new Google Earth also introduces: historical imagery, allowing users to virtually travel back in time through archival satellite and aerial imagery; touring, which makes it simple to create a narrated tour in Google Earth and share it with the world; and Google Mars 3-D, which features hi-res imagery and terrain of the fourth planet.

Larry Madin, WHOI director of research, said in a statement that up to this point “most people know only the surface or edges of the ocean, but Google Earth with Ocean promises to give us the “street view” into its depth, to see what the water and the bottom look like, what animals live there, and what humans have learned in their explorations of the sea.”

An advisory council, along with Google engineers, worked for more than two years to develop a tool that will be useful to students, scientists, and armchair ocean explorers, according to a Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) spokesperson.