You might soon start to think this blog should be re-christened Ogle South Georgia, but earlier I asked British Antarctic Survey‘s Andrew Fleming for some context around the new imagery of South Georgia in Google Earth, and here is what he wrote back:

The new satellite imagery of South Georgia available in Google Earth is a Landsat 7 colour composite which preserves the 15m pixel spacing of the high resolution panchromatic data. This image was acquired in February 2003 and is the only (mostly) cloud free Landsat image of South Georgia in the entire archive. There are a couple of very small areas in the west where another image was used to replace a cloudy patch. The image, together with elevation information from the SRTM shuttle mission and other data held by the British Antarctic Survey was used to complete a new topographic map of the island at 1:200,000 scale for the Government of South Georgia – the first new map since Duncan Carse‘s map of 1957. The appearance of the Landsat image in Google Earth is hopefully the first step in providing better detail imagery of the Southern Polar regions over the coming months.