Isn’t it annoying when everyone and their Drudge links to an article by the Federation of American Scientists noting the discovery of a new class of Chinese nuclear submarine on Google Earth, without actually linking to the submarine in Google Earth? It’d be like mentioning the existence of a cool new website but forgetting the URL. Ogle Earth will have none of it:-) Here it is.

And as it turns out, “Panther37” on Google Earth Community identified the very same submarine as a Jin-class way back in July 2006, a year before the “experts”.

Perhaps even more interesting is that the placemarks that started that paricular GEC thread were subsequently removed, with the thread initiator commenting “I won’t go into the reasons here why”. Gotta love the Google Earth Community base layer and the wisdom of its crowds, even despite occasional (self?-)censorship.