Satellite services let Web users explore Earth

The Baltimore Sun

Andre Mueller is a virtual explorer of virgin territory.

One morning, the 25-year-old German physics student noticed a wispy line off the coast of Iceland in the patchwork of satellite imagery that makes up Google Earth.

He zoomed in.

It was smoke.

At the end of the smoke trail, he discovered three boats. He slapped a "placemark," the program's version of an explorer's flag, on the location and reported his findings on Google Earth Community bulletin board.

"What are these three ships doing there?" wrote Mueller. "And why is there so much smoke?"

His fellow office-chair detectives praised him for the discovery, then went to work to solve the mystery of the burning ship.

Google Earth is packed with things that its creators never intended. Paper maps are a cartographer's rendering of the world, whereas digital versions in Google Earth, Google Maps and Microsoft's Live Search Maps are sophisticated collages - moments captured by cameras on satellites and airplanes, seamlessly blended to create a digital world.

The photos from on high reveal life going on when the shutter opened and closed: airplanes in flight, surfers off Malibu, mourners in a Chicago cemetery, a Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park, a cement truck overturned in San Francisco.

"These are life's moments that are unexpectedly caught from above," said Jason Lee, 30, a marketer in Bellingham, Wash.

Lee and computer programmer Jon Coogan run Bird's Eye Tourist, a Web site that compiles things of interest found in a Live Search Maps feature known as "bird's eye view."

What may appear as a blemish to digital mapmakers is a sport for virtual discoverers. The hunt is on to find and share those moments.

The Google Earth Community and independent enthusiast sites such as Google Earth Blog, Google Sightseeing and Bird's Eye Tourist serve as repositories for these finds.

John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Maps, said the hunt for interesting things reminded him of the Web's early days, before search engines and directories.

"There's a huge amount of undiscovered territory out there for these geo-explorers to go and explore," he said.

Unlike famous explorers such as Capt. James Cook, these virtual voyagers can scour the globe with little physical effort or danger. Google Earth covers about 30 percent of the world's land surface with high-resolution imagery.

Mueller, the physics student, is an amateur astronomer and map buff. On July 26, 2005, at home in Aachen, Germany, he turned his attention to what he calls the "next-generation atlas" on his laptop.

First, he activated a Google Earth feature that displays, as dots on the map, everything the program's users had ever tagged as noteworthy. He focused on empty spots. By chance, he spotted the smoke trail leading to the ship, about 7 nautical miles off the coast of Iceland's Reykjanes peninsula.

The first reply to his posting came nine minutes later.

"That scene does not look good at all," a visitor wrote on the community's bulletin board, noting the presence of another ship that appeared to be racing to help. Another member pointed out yet another ship, heading to shore.

Seven responses were posted in the first two days. One sleuth pinpointed the fire's date; he activated a feature revealing that DigitalGlobe, the company that provides most of Google Earth's satellite images, had shot the photo almost a year earlier, on Aug. 11, 2004.

But the trail went cold, and the message board silent, for three weeks. Mueller thought that the answer would never come.

"On my own I could never find out what exactly I saw," Mueller said. "But in the global village there is someone, somewhere, speaking Icelandic who knows just where to look in the right newspaper archive for details."

Programs that compile satellite imagery into maps have long existed, but the expensive price tag left them the playground of government officials, academic researchers and real estate developers.

That changed in 2004 when Google bought Keyhole Corp., a company Hanke helped create to let users view satellite images over the Internet.

Google immediately cut the price for a one-year subscription to the basic version of the mapping software to $29.95 from $69.95, then made it available free the next year. More than 200 million copies of the software have been downloaded.

Microsoft soon followed with its own program, Windows Live Local, which is now called Live Search Maps. It, like Google Maps, is a Web-based program that does not require a software download.

There are many practical uses for Google Earth. Programmers have layered housing data on maps so that renters or homebuyers can shop from above. Whale sharks, bike racers and professional sailors hooked up to global positioning systems have had their progress tracked as dots moving across the surface of the maps. Amateurs tooling around on Google Earth have found previously undiscovered meteor craters and Roman ruins.

Many people simply enjoy looking around these virtual worlds. New users typically start by seeing what their homes look like from above. Then maybe their offices or schools. Then popular landmarks near them. They might then do some virtual sightseeing before growing bored.

But some people keep looking.

Hanke of Google Earth and Stephen Lawler, his counterpart at Microsoft, say they don't ask the photo providers to capture people or events - it just happens. There's so much raw footage being fed automatically into the mapping programs that human eyes never view the vast majority of the images before they're published.

"It's like a treasure hunt for people," Lawler said.

Discoveries include those sad and silly.

Alan Glennon, a graduate student in geology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, spent the day after Thanksgiving looking at burned-out villages and refugee camps in Darfur, Sudan, after Google Earth updated the program with higher-resolution images from Africa.

Contributors to Google Sightseeing (motto: "Why bother seeing the world for real?") compiled shipwrecks scattered along the coast of the Western Sahara and Morocco.

Meanwhile, Google Sightseeing has compiled a list of its 10 favorite images featuring nude sunbathers. The photos are clear enough to see that the sunbathers are probably wearing little or no clothing, but not sharp enough to go beyond that.

Virtual tourists have found elephants and giraffes at the Los Angeles Zoo, sea lions on a pier in San Francisco, killer whales feeding at a marine park in San Antonio and what appears to be a great egret flying above a field near Bourne End, England.

Finding objects in midair is among the most competitive pursuits. Enthusiasts have meticulously cataloged hundreds of aircraft: commercial jets, retired SR-71 Blackbird spy planes, hang gliders, blimps, a KC-135 aerial tanker refueling a C-5 Galaxy Air Force transport plane in flight, even a plane with its wheels facing the sky as it completes a loop the loop.

It's a Sisyphean task: Google and Microsoft periodically refresh the maps with new images, as often as every few months in more densely populated areas. So just when the plane-tagging hobbyists think they've discovered most of the planes, some disappear. The scramble starts again.

In the case of the burning ship off Iceland, patience brought answers.

On Aug. 16, someone using the name "solskin" posted a link to a story on the Google Earth bulletin board, in Icelandic, about the incident. No direct translation to English was available, but the contributor said that the ship was the Eyrarrost KE-25 and that there was one man aboard, who was rescued.

On Sept. 9, "jonbg" posted an English translation of the story: "A man was rescued by a nearby boat after his boat had caught fire around noon today," it began.

The story came full circle four months after Mueller's original discovery. A member of an Icelandic search and rescue team stumbled across the online conversation and showed his colleague, Agnar Juliusson, who had captained the ship that DigitalGlobe's satellite captured racing to the scene.

On Nov. 28, Juliusson posted his version of events on the Google Earth Community message board: His crew managed to put out the fire, but another boat interfered with the towing effort. The fishing boat "sank on site," Juliusson wrote.

Google Earth enthusiasts marveled at the outcome.

"It really is sleuthing to figure out this stuff," said Frank Taylor, a former National Aeronautics and Space Administration researcher in Cary, N.C., who runs Google Earth's blog.

"To capture a specific incident like that almost requires a community of millions of people before you find somebody who has the facts."

Chris Gaither writes for the Los Angeles Times.

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