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Google Earth: High-resolution imagery in Antarctica

As Google has continually improved the quality of their imagery across the globe, one area always seemed to stay low-res — Antarctica. Thanks to the help of the Polar Geospatial Center (PCG), that’s beginning to change.

A great example of that is the Mackay Glacier Tongue, located in Granite Harbor, seen here:

You can see it for yourself, as shown in the article, using this KML file.

So far, the PGC has helped Google update nearly 1,000,000 square kilometers, with another 275,000 square kilometers added every three months. While it will take a while to get the entire continent updated (more than 14,000,000 sq km), they’re certainly making great progress.

Along with updating the quality of the imagery, they’re also working to improve the accuracy of the location of the imagery. The PGC’s Paul Morin will be heading down to the Antarctic Peninsula soon to help improve the imagery from being off by as much as 30 meters to being accurate within a single meter.

The full article at The Antarctic Sun is quite interesting and well worth your time to read. We all enjoy the constantly improving imagery quality in Google Earth, and the PGC is just one of many companies working with Google to help move things forward.

(via @OgleEarth)

Celebration Town

While Disney is famous for their theme-parks, did you know that they also built a town? Google Sightseeing takes us on a brief tour of Celebration, the town that Disney built in the mid-1990s.

The city was was designed around its downtown, to encourage walking rather than driving. The town has some very cute buildings it in, such as the post office seen below. However, Disney was careful to keep it generically cute, and not include any Disney-like features such as Mickey Mouse ears or Dumbo-shaped bushes.

Once complete, as planned, Disney sold the town to a property investment corporation. You can learn more about the city on their official website.

As they typically do, Google Sightseeing has created a KML file to showcase all of the locations found in their post. The city has sharp aerial imagery from 2010 and very comprehensive Street View imagery, making it a fun town to explore in Google Earth!

Strange structures in the Chinese desert

As reported by a handful of readers, a popular story about “strange lines in China” is making its way around the internet. There are a variety of odd-looking items in the area of the Kumtag desert, but this one is the most striking: