Scientists have been watching Antarctica’s Wilkins Ice Shelf carefully these past few years, as it has been getting smaller and smaller. Back in March 2008 its impending disintegration made for some great aerial video as well as a satellite image overlay of the ice shelf then.

Now, the death watch has begun in earnest. In Late November 2008, reports the European Space Agency,

[…] new rifts developed on the ice shelf that scientists warn could lead to the opening of the ice bridge that connects the ice shelf to the Charcot island. If the ice bridge were to open, it could put the entire ice shelf at risk of further disintegrating.

As a result, ESA scientists have begun posting satellite imagery of the ice shelf to the web on a daily basis, using imagery from ESA’s Envisat satellite’s Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR).

The archive of daily imagery is available here, or you can watch an automatically updated animated GIF of the most recent images:

Google Earth doesn’t support animated GIFs, but I did take a recent still image and turned it into an overlay of how the ice shelf looks now:

Combine it with the overlay from March to see how things have changed since then.

When the Ancient Rome layer was announced to much fanfare a bit more than a month ago, many people tempted by the great still shots came away disappointed by the execution — all but the very latest desktops could really do much with it.

Now Frank at Google Earth blog has alerted me that the layers have been tweaked to be much more responsive, so I’ve taken another look.

This time around, the layers are usable on my year-old MacBook Pro. All the content combined still takes upwards of 15 minutes to download on a fast broadband connection, but Google Earth is now far snappier if you want to fly through Ancient Rome.

The layers now also come with this recommendation: “Dual-Core 2.0GHz CPU + 3 GB RAM + High End GPU with 512 MB RAM Suggested”.

In sum, if you’re an educator and thought the layers weren’t usable in the classroom before, give it another go, and consider (once again) entering the Ancient Rome 3D Curriculum Competition for best educational use of the layer.

Frankly, the world has been a little boring ever since the Cold War ended. With Russian warships visiting Cuba, however, nostalgists may soon have everything they wished for — in which case, best to be prepared with a few KML layers:

• Russian air defences mapped: IMINT & Analysis’s Sean O’Connor has just published a huge post detailing many of Russia’s air defence installations, both new and older inactive ones from the Cold War. It comes with its own KML layer that also shows you Russia’s six military zones. This really is an amazing post, with great analysis and context, also in the comments — imagine how much fun it would have been to have had Google Earth back in the 1980s.

  I particularly like the geometric patterns that the old, inactivated Cold-War era surface-to-air defence installations make around Moscow:

  

• Berlin Wall: Ostalgists will like Stephanie Lange’s KML overlay that records the path of the Berlin Wall through central Berlin. It’s not just the wall, though, that’s shown, but the entire “death strip” that was cleared on the East-German side to prevent people from hopping over.

  Berlin has changed a lot since 1989, and the zone has been rebuilt in some places, while in others it has been left to grow wild — in those places you can clearly see the walking paths that have developed organically over the past 19 years; where people would have walked if they could during the 28 years the wall existed.

  

  Stephanie’s path does not cover the wall beyond the city, though in fact it used to extend all the way around West Berlin. The rest of the border is visible if you turn on Borders in Google Earth. With this layer turned on, you can follow that curious no-man’s land all the way around.

  For extra credit, find all all the West Berlin exclaves — some parts of West Berlin were completely surrounded by East Germany. Strange Maps wrote a series of posts about them not too long ago.

More broadly, it’s interesting to see how past conflicts and borders continue to leave an impact on today’s globe.

I’ve been jaded about 3D buildings in virtual globes for a while, but the recently introduced blanket 3D modelling of Manhattan in Google Earth is just stunning in its scope and detail.

Upon closer scrutiny it is immediately obvious that the models are unique, and each one faithful to the real thing. Sides of buildings are not filled with repeating patterns but with an actual picture, even for repetitive-looking housing projects. An apartment I grew up in on the upper east side had its elaborate terraces modeled accurately to within the meter. The view from my 6th floor walkup towards the World Trade Center on 9/11 can be replicated perfectly:

In fact, you can even figure out which buildings have been built since that picture was taken.

Google Earth credits Sanborn with the buildings layer, but doesn’t divulge just how it was made. It can’t have been an off-the-shelf fully automated system: Just stroll through the canyon than is Wall Street and you’ll notice that many of the buildings there received individual attention. Flying a plane in a gridlike pattern over Manhattan and taking georeferenced photogrammetic photos doesn’t cut it over Midtown and Wall Street, where much of a building would be obscured from view. (This is one of the downsides of the otherwise impressive technique used by Sweden’s C3.) Possibly the layer was made from a combination of different techniques, including taking photos from the ground, perhaps combined with laser scanning — something which Sanborn does.

Curiously, some famous buildings are not cooperating with this update, and are now conspicuous in their gray monotones. Take, for example, the UN Plaza building, or the Plaza Hotel.

There are a couple more. Why might that be? Could there possibly be copyright issues with overzealous architects or owners? Was the layer just not finished in time? Or are these buildings currently undergoing renovations, and are thus hidden in scaffolding? I’m not in NYC at the moment, so can’t check the later theory, but am guessing it is the correct one.

Finally, it’s also immediately obvious that this solution scales well. It is very responsive on my Mac in a way that the recently released Ancient Rome layer emphatically is not.

• Google Earth Plus discontinued: Le Technoblog du LAC flags Google’s announcement that the $20 Plus version of Google Earth, which let you visualize a GPS track in real time, is no longer available. The good news:
  

  One of the main reasons why people chose Google Earth Plus is GPS tracking. We realize that some users may be disappointed in the loss of this feature, so we assure you that we’re working on making this a feature of the free version in the near future.

  Plus users can try Pro for free for two months, or buy a one-year Pro license for $99 (instead of $400).

• GeoUpdater: Nico Tranquilli writes:
  

  Just wrote a service based on FireEagle, Facebook, GoogleMaps and

  Geonames. It may be of interest to your readers.

  GeoUpdater reads location data from your Fire Eagle account as you move and automatically push status updates to Facebook. Users can opt in for location history and get a personal GeoRSS feed (for FriendFeed or blog integration)

  Recent locations can also be displayed on a map and linked from status updates; nearby wikipedia entries are shown near the map.

• GeoServer 1.7.1 released: “The biggest improvement in this release is better Google Earth support. Using revamped KML output (known as the KML “reflector”) GeoServer can now output vector super-overlays.”
• Thematic Mapping Engine goes Creative Commons: Bjørn Sandvik’s web-driven KML visualizer for country statistics data has just been released under a Creative Commons license, including the cool rendering directly to the web browser via the Google Earth web plugin.
• HoudahGPS 3.0 released: This GPS-to-Mac utility gets an update, letting you connect to more GPS devices and also convert between GPS, NMEA and KML.
• Google Earth API release notes: I forgot to link to them. In addition to the new Mac version, the Windows version of the plugin also got a revamp.
• ARMAP: Very thorough: Arctic Research Mapping Application (ARMAP) “is a suite of online, interactive maps and services that support Arctic science. With 2D Maps and 3D Globes, users can navigate to areas of interest and explore or query information about field-based scientific research in the Arctic.” Free, and comes with KML files.
• ViwoGeo: This interesting mashup takes into account that many of the places in Second Life mirror or re-imagine real-life locations — including those from the past or future. ViwoGeo lets you georeference Second Life locations, so you can browse Second Life geographically.
• Wireless broadband hits 21 Mbps: Slightly off-topic, but still: Soon my perpatietic life will get even easier, thanks to HSPA Evolution, an improved wireless broadband technology developed by Ericsson. (Via GigaOm)

And finally… If you use a Mac, you’ll have noticed that the map in the upper right corner of Ogle Earth has now become Google Earth, courtesy of Cristian Streng’s Mobile GMaps.

In the coming days it should be pointed at Southern Egypt, as I’m headed there for a long weekend. Unfortunately, this means Ogle Earth will once again go quiet, until early next week.

The funny thing about being a modern web worker is that the meaning of vacation has changed — no longer does it mean just stopping work; these day it is merely the right to delay your contribution to the value-chain until you return to your desk and catch up on said work. In the end, you end up doing the same amount of work, vacation or no.

Regardless, I’m grateful for the week I’ve had to rummage around in Middle Egypt, and ended up not paying much attention to the internet (and what a luxury that is). Now that I’ve caught up at work, it’s time to catch up at blog. Cool georeferenced trip photos and tracks will follow later.

• Google Earth web plugin for Mac comes with, er, spyware: Swedish MacWorld alerts us that the otherwise wonderful and much anticipated Google Earth web plugin for Mac also installs a separate application that runs at startup and is intended to check for updates to installed Google web plugins — but with full root access to your Mac, and by phoning home, as detected by anti-spyware app Little Snitch. So what is the problem? It’s the fact that you are not told during installation that this additional software is being installed, nor given a choice to install it (or not). If anyone else but Google were to do this, we’d be calling it spyware and raking those responsible over metaphorical coals.

  Macworld’s Anders Lundberg wastes no time telling us which files to delete to get rid of the application. Even if your Swedish isn’t any good, the list is easy to follow.

  Soon after, The LA Times came out with a post that puts Google’s updater in a wider context, and also criticizes it for overstepping a boundary:

  The updater doesn’t appear to do anything harmful, per se. But it’s annoying. Although it’s well-hidden, it runs constantly and cannot be disabled unless you remove the software it’s associated with. Only a few apps are supported at the moment — the Talk plugin, App Engine and Google Earth Plugin, among them.

  As the LA Times notes, Google seems willing to correct this transgression in a future update, as implied in this KML Developer Support Google Group post.

• iPhone in Egypt redux: Six weeks after you read it here on Ogle Earth, mainstream media catches on to the news that the Egyptian iPhone has no GPS functionality, at least not as sold.

  The New York Times kicks off this round with an article that does a good job of asking the bigger questions — is it alright for a technology company to acquiesce to authoritarian dictates for its products, and to what extent is access to GPS a “right” — while the Guardian gets a quote from yours truly.

  Just keep in mind that GPS has always been banned for civilians in Egypt, because of a lack of legislative initiatives by a dysfunctional government and a paranoid military that still has a significant voice in national politics. In other words, the GPS ban is nothing personal, and it’s not enforced (because it is not enforceable). If anything, the high profile of the iPhone may goad the government into some face-saving action.

More updates tomorrow. First, some sleep.

Understandable revulsion at the terror attacks on Mumbai has alas become intertwined with an idiotic need for indiscriminate blame-mongering and grandstanding — a local lawyer has now filed a petition in Bombay High Court demanding that all imagery of India be removed from Google Earth.

The petition filed by Mumbai-based lawyer Amit Karkhanis has demanded removal of images of the country from Google Earth.

“In the alternative, I have demanded that at least the images of vital installations in the country be blocked,” said Karkhanis.

“The petition is filed against the backdrop of terror attacks in Mumbai,” he said. “Even images of nuclear plants and defence establishments are available on this site. It is a security hazard,” he added.

What’s wrong with this story? Let us count the ways.

The terrorists didn’t attack “sensitive” targets like nuclear power plants or military bases. They attacked public spaces in the middle of a city, accessible to everyone with a camera, and visible on thousands of different kinds of maps. Google Earth’s imagery is the best of the bunch, perhaps, but not unique or irreplaceable. Removing it would not have prevented this attack.

Forcing Google to make imagery of India inaccessible to users of Google Earth in India would mean that everyone but people in India could access the imagery. Considering that the planning for the attacks likely took place outside India, such a ban would have achieved nothing, security-wise. And let’s not forget that people sophisticated enough to use VOIP to coordinate their attacks are also likely to know about proxy servers.

Karkhanis’s argument, if he were being consistent, is that progress must be stopped because it cannot be controlled. Because we cannot force people to use maps, mobile phones, GPS and the internet only for good, we must ban their use completely, even if the amount of good they do far outweighs the amount of evil they enable.

The Times of India (TOI) has further clues that Amit Karkhanis is not that clever:

The advocate, in his [petition], said the premium edition with a subscription of US $400 allowed even real-time maps and updates to be accessed. Even the pictures of the ongoing construction of the Worli-Bandra Sealink were available on the site, Karkhanis noted.

That’s just pure fantasy. The dataset is the same for both the free version and the paid version. (It would be really cool if real-time updates were possible, however:-)

One more fact check: TOI continues to claim, despite it being blatantly not the case and despite an on-the-record denial by Google, that Google had previously agreed to blur sensitive sites in India:

Last February [in 2007], as TOI had reported, the Indian government and Google Earth had agreed to show “fuzzy, low-resolution or distorted pictures” of sensitive military and scientific establishments on the web.

So perhaps the kind of media that manages to consistently misreport a verifiable fact should share the blame for this latest legal embarrassment. Amit Karkhanis probably reads TOI uncritically.

In sum, there is not much to worry about — anyone can file this kind of petition, and a modicum of critical thinking will lead to its dismissal.

In the meantime, UK’s Times Online has a balanced piece that raises the question of how India’s upcoming official mapping service, Bhuvan, is meant to show India after Mumbai’s terror episode. Bhuvan’s backers say it will have imagery of India that is more frequently updated and of higher resolution that Google Earth, though with censored sensitive sites. Do those sites include central Mumbai now? Or can Bhuvan predict where terrorists will strike next and automatically blur those places? If not, is the Indian government prepared for news that a potential future terror attack in say, downtown Calcutta, was planned with Bhuvan?