The reason I’m in Cambridge this summer is to help develop the future website for the International Polar Year (IPY, 2007-2008), a major scientific collaboration that will involve scientists from over 30 countries working on several thousand science projects in the Arctic and Antarctic.
Much of the collected data will be ideal for visualizing in geobrowsers like Google Earth. Part of my job is to see what’s feasible; one thing I’ve done is take a look at polar resources in KML that already exist. Below is the list — I’m sure I’ve missed some, so if you know of more polar content published to geobrowsers, please leave a comment or let me know.
IPY-related (so far):
- Damocles, near-live Arctic layers
- Polarview, near-live Antarctic layers
- Danish Polar Center, Proposed IPY projects in Greenland
Not IPY-related:
- Shackleton’s expedition (highly recommended)
- Overlay of the newly discovered 500-km wide impact crater on Antarctica
- NOAA’s Aurora activity plot (both north and south)
- Ice thickness overlay, Antarctica
- Bouvetøya, medium-res image and map overlay
- The path of the annular eclipse over Antarctica on Feb 7, 2008
- Roald Amundsen’s 1911-1912 expedition to the South Pole
- NSIDC’s State of the Cryosphere: Then-and-now images of georeferenced glaciers (not strictly polar)
Stefan…a suggestion: put all these links together into a network link so folks can load them with a single click into Google Earth.
Have you seen this?
http://www.googleearthhacks.com/dlcat1/Network-Links.htm
Antarctic Monitering
Downloads: 178
Date Posted: June 24th, 2006
Rating: 3.43
Shows the location of research stations, research vessels, ice bergs, and drift buoys, in this network link provided by:
http://www.seaice.dk/polarview/google.s/
Yes, that’s already in the list, thanks/