Mission Blue: Follow an Expedition off Easter Island, Chile

Have you ever dreamed of embarking on an exciting expedition? Well, now you can follow a ship traveling the ocean in Google Earth. National Geographic and Oceana scientists in collaboration with the Chilean Navy are traveling on their next Mission Blue expedition to the remote Salas y Gomez Island. This island is 250 miles (390 km) east of Easter Island. They aim to discover what lies beneath these largely unexplored waters.

To follow along, open Google Earth and search for “Easter Island, Chile”. Look for the blue ship icon heading eastward as it travels to Salas y Gomez Island. Check back daily through March 10th to track this expedition (make sure the Places layer is turned on). The science team will share updates from the expedition as they travel east from Easter Island toward Salas y Gomez Island – including photographs, videos and links to the National Geographic News Watch blog. National Geographic and Oceana are members of Mission Blue.

We are also excited that we were able to quickly publish new imagery for the island in Google Earth and Google Maps, so that now anyone can visit Salas y Gomez virtually.

Click on the blue ship icon near Easter Island in Google Earth
to see the most recent post from the expedition.

In addition to the ship icon in Google Earth, you can also download the expedition KML or visit the Google Earth Gallery to download the file.

To bring this expedition to life for thousands of teachers and students around the globe, the National Geographic Ocean Education Program is working with Oracle® Education Foundation in the Oracle ThinkQuest online community. Educators can find lesson plans, submit questions to the research team while at sea, discuss with classrooms around the world and more. Visit the ThinkQuest website to apply to join the global community of teachers and students.

We hope you enjoy this virtual adventure at sea with the research team at Mission Blue.

The workshop to model The Hague

Last month, we told you about an upcoming workshop to help model more The Hague, Netherlands in 3D. They were hoping for a solid turnout, and certainly got one with more than 60 people attending!

hague-people.jpg

Prizes were awarded for the best models created that day and MILO Minderbinder, who isn’t old enough to drive and had to take a three-hour train ride each way in order to attend, was the clear winner. He built an excellent model of “De Bijenkorf Den Haag“, which can be seen here:

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For his efforts, he was awared with a 3D print of the model, which was provided by i.materalise. Local firm Design8 organized and promoted the event.

With that many people excited about modeling buildings in The Hague, along with the obvious talent that some of them have, I expect to see quite a few buildings pop up there over the next few months.

For more about the event, be sure to check out this article in the SketchUp Blog.

Record Melt in Greenland in 2010

Record Melting in Greenland during 2010 NASA Earth Observatory has a map showing the record melt of Greenland’s ice cap in 2010, during which the melt started earlier and lasted longer than usual. “This image was assembled from microwave data from the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) of the Defense Meteorological Satellites Program. Snow and ice emit microwaves, but the signal is different for wet, melting snow than for dry. Marco Tedesco, a professor at the City College of New York, uses this difference to chart the number of days that snow is melting every year. This image above shows 2010 compared to the average number of melt days per year between 1979 and 2009.”