A colleague suggested to me yesterday that my San Francisco earthquake planning lesson needed some images to help those students who found it hard to visualize the city solely from Google Earth imagery.
By happy coincidence, on the same day, Google Earth Blog highlighted the latest additions to the Worldwide Panorama. This is a huge collection of high quality Virtual Reality panoramas. A Google Earth file is available here with links to whole collection. Quick Time is needed to view the images. It’s an essential addition to a geographer’s My Places folder.
I have added links to a few of the panoramas in the latest addition of the San Francisco project file
Andy Hudson-Smith of Digitally Distributed Environments has added a Google Earth overlay in the form of a London map from 1690. It would make an excellent teaching resource for both geography annd history lessons.
At first glance, I felt that the positioning of the 1609 map was a little out. However, after some considerable time fiddling around with it I can’t claim to have made any real improvement on the original overlay!
I’m rapidly talking myself into getting a smartphone. Not just for the live GPS tracking (see previous post), but because of concepts like Semapedia. In essence, Semapedia is about tagging real world locations with internet-based information, via a mobile phone. This could be a great (and highly subversive) fieldwork activity. Ogle Earth has posted an interesting article about Semapedia, together with a link to a Google Earth file for viewing some of the recently tagged locations.
I’ve printed out my first Semapedia tags - can you guess where they are going?
update 29/1/06 - I’ve just addded my first Semipedia tagged image to Flickr. The image is also tagged with the Flickr Fly script - see this page for more details
Ricoh have introduced a new camera which is able to add location data to photos as they are taken. This would be brilliant for fieldwork. An idea of the likely cost, and more details about the camera may be found at GeoSpatial Experts
This is just too easy! Locapoint provides an exceptionally simple way of annotating Google Maps. It’s also free! The only problem I’ve discovered is that the resulting code breaks this blog page. I’ll investigate further. The example shows the location of my previous post about the Charmouth landslip. It took about 30 seconds!
A big thanks to All Points Blog for highlighting this one!
I’ve now added the map to a page on Juicy Geography
Earlier last week the BBC reported a “dramatic rescue” of fossil hunters, cut off on a rising tide by a large landslide in the unstable Jurassic cliffs at Charmouth, Dorset, UK.
I have made an animation to explain the cause of the slump, or at least, what I think happened!
click the image to run the animation
The animation is made in Koolmoves. I really like this program, it’s much easier than Flash to learn, and it’s very good value for money. Some more of my animations may be found here.
I visited the site of the landslide to take some photographs, which can be seen at Flickr.
photos
More information about the Jurassic coast here. Southampton University have a number of pages devoted to the geology of the region and this site has some useful visualizations about the mass movement processess operating locally. Fossil hunters might be interested in a description of the fossil-bearing strata and field guide found here.
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