Google Earth puts an entire planet's worth of useful, relevant, and just plain weird content at your fingertips. As you saw in "The Strangest Sights in Google Earth," some things in this world are simply out of this globe.
To find such wonderful sights, you lot tin can call on a large library of Globe add-ons. As authors of the Web site Google Sightseeing, we run across a lot of these add-ons and collections.
What follows is a list of x of our favorites. Note that some of the links go straight to .kml or .kmz files, which Google Earth can read. When you open these files, notwithstanding, the content may not immediately display; in that instance, look in the Temporary Places folder in the Places pane.
Have a Trip Back in Time
Content in Google Earth doesn't always have to focus on in-the-present data–it often allows users to do a picayune time traveling too. David Rumsey, a renowned cartographer, has clustered a collection of over 150,000 historical maps, 120 of which he has used to create a fascinating layer of maps that shows how the globe looked between 1680 and 1930. The highlight is the world globe from 1790 (shown), which demonstrates how dramatically the borders have shifted for many countries, peculiarly in prewar Europe and the Center Eastward. (Toggle Earth'southward default Main Database layers to get a amend view.)
Mapping Craigslist
Earthify has a much grander proper noun than you might look, given that all it actually does is to have a folio of Craigslist posts (from whichever locality you lot specify) and plot them in Google Earth. Of course, when you think about it, that kind of makes sense, given that Craigslist is all about local information. Cleverly, Earthify provides a browser-bookmark link that y'all can utilize to open, in Google Globe, the locations posted on whatever Craiglist page; as a result, if you lot're searching for an apartment, for case, you lot tin can instantly encounter if the listings are close to subways, restaurants, or whatever other amenities you might be interested in. Essentially, Earthify lets y'all use Google Globe as a geographical newsreader for Craigslist, turning a unproblematic thought into an incredibly powerful tool.
Follow That Plane!
Google Earth fans tin can be fairly obsessive, every bit demonstrated by i user collection that pinpoints the position of every known plane that has been spotted flying in Google Earth's satellite imagery. Simply FBOWeb.com helps you obtain potentially more-useful information: It employs Google Earth to provide alive 3D tracking of every single plane flying over the U.s.a.. On this page y'all'll encounter links to habitation in on a region of interest to you lot (for example, New York's JFK International Airport).
The data includes all commercial flights as well as many private ones, and it updates every minute (lagging just 5 minutes behind real time), displaying the flight path as a 3D line around the surface of the virtual globe.
In one case yous complete a gratis registration procedure, you tin can even search for a detail flight number and come across exactly how far away the plane is from the airport. It can't make the plane fly any faster, though.
Take a Virtual Cruise
Back in the dark ages of the Net, people were thrilled to log in to a Webcam on the other side of the world and see the trees outside someone's window, or the status of a java auto. Cheers to the incredible leaps in engineering science since and so, these days yous tin can watch the feeds from a Webcam fastened to the front of a cruise ship sailing somewhere in the middle of the ocean. The Costa Cruise company has added existent-fourth dimension tracking, Webcams, and atmospheric condition information for its entire fleet of ships. You can watch these vessels as they plow through the virtual waters of Google Earth; click on a ship's link to view its Webcam feed in a popular-up window.
Seeking out cruise liners that are navigating cold, rainy seas, for example, might make you feel amend about being stuck at home.
Bring together a Worldwide Treasure Hunt
Geocaching is a modern-solar day take on the scavenger hunt: Participants apply superaccurate GPS positioning to locate subconscious treasures, or caches. The caches, which can exist well concealed, usually comprise pocket-sized trinkets and a log book in which you can record that you found the enshroud before you put it back for the adjacent person to find.
Every bit of August 2008, Geocaching.com, a fundamental site for the hobby, had almost 650,000 caches marked. Once you've registered for a complimentary account with the site, yous tin can download a Google Earth network link to encounter all of the different types of caches near a location. If yous're lucky, ane of your local caches may also comprise a "Travel Problems," which you are encouraged to motility physically to a cache in a new location. A unique code that you enter along with the cache's coordinates at the Web site then allows beau geocachers to runway the bug as it travels effectually the globe.
Thar She Blows
Have yous ever noticed how weather reports for where you lot alive e'er seem to be completely wrong? That'south particularly problematic when the forces of nature threaten to have devastating effects. And then in the truthful spirit of the Web, a Google Globe forums user known every bit "glooton" created a potentially lifesaving link that lets you check for yourself how the weather might touch on you. The data displayed in Google Earth tracks the paths and positions of every major storm and hurricane across the entire planet. The data updates every 10 minutes, and enables anyone with a PC to exist his or her own personal meteorologist.
Millions of Photos Put in Place
Now that some cameras (such every bit Nikon's new Coolpix P6000) have born GPS radios that automatically capture information about where exactly a photo was taken, you tin use one in conjunction with Google World and other tools to start building an entire world full of images.
Google Globe incorporates several different ways to explore traditional "ground level" photographs of the world. But the folks at Metallic Toad Media have taken the entire catalog of the Flickr photograph-sharing site and implemented it as a Google Earth-uniform feed. You can see user-uploaded images of the Grand Canyon, for instance, that will have you lot nearly standing on the border of a precipice. In Baronial, Flickr boasted an incredible "3.ii million things geotagged this calendar month," then adding its content to Google World brings a vast assortment of images from areas you might wish to explore.
See Global Warming in Action
One of the most difficult challenges climatologists face is convincing some people that the trouble of global warming exists. Climate information tin can exist hard to visualize, and for many people data tables fail to communicate the scale of the problem. One solution is to apply Google Earth to display data in a style that is easier to sympathize: The National Snow and Water ice Data Center has created Google World files for a series of animations that represents the Arctic ice as it naturally melts over the summertime months. Updated daily, they permit y'all view the sea-ice concentrations and extent for the previous ninety days; when you compare data for this summer with the data for every summer going all the way back to 1979, you see some startling changes.
Your City in 3D
Not content with photographing, filming, or otherwise recording every nook and cranny of our planet, some people choose to spend their spare time creating virtual 3D models of existent-life buildings to further enhance the immersive nature of Google Earth. Google encourages local governments and colleges to produce 3D models of their cities, towns, and campuses–and for those of us who don't accept the resources available to institutions, it provides SketchUp, software with which anyone tin fairly easily create a 3D model of a house, school, office, shed, or treehouse. The Google Earth 3D Warehouse displays the models, and your models may be selected to go office of the 3D Warehouse layer within Google World.
Live Orbiting Satellites
Going about our daily lives, nosotros give little idea to the thousands of satellites that zoom effectually in a higher place our heads, carrying our communications, transmitting television signals, and sometimes even taking our pictures. The openAPRS database tracks the current location of hundreds of satellites in Google Earth, grouping them into categories such as amateur radio, global positioning, weather, and fifty-fifty military machine satellites. You'll want to switch on only a few categories at once, however, every bit the skies above are astonishingly crowded.
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