The world’s most popular free desktop mapping software - Google Earth, said on Monday that there are releasing an advanced 3-D mapping technology that enables users or even geographers to explore the amazing underwater world as if you’re swimming. The folks there said that you can even swim through undersea canyons as deep as the Mariana Trench and encounter creatures like a critically endangered, prehistoric fish called the coelacanth.
To starting using this new feature, you would have to head to the Google Earth website and download the Google Earth 5.0 beta. Next, put a check mark next to the ‘Oceans’ layer in the Google Earth software.
Google has partnered with dozens of content providers so that you can receive the best mapping experience you’ve never enjoyed before. Some popular ones includes BBC, California Academy of Sciences, DOER Marine, National Geographic Society and Stanford University, Hopkins Marine Station.
We can discover new places including surf, dive, and travel hotspots and shipwrecks. Exploring 3-D shipwrecks like the famous Titanic incident is also possible. As a geography student, I feel that this new Google Earth is really benefitcial as it can help me study georaphical locations and the underwater world. This is hardly experienced in school and I hope teachers will use this impressive mapping software as a teaching tool.
Of course, every software or apps have their own downsides. For Google Earth, it doesn’t allows users to zoom down and then in the water to see shipwrecks.
Google board member and former Vice President Al Gore, who attended the event at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, called the latest version of Google Earth “an extremely powerful educational tool” that he hoped would influence the Climate Conference in Copenhagen later this year.
Dedina said the ability to see the ocean floor used to be reserved for expensive scientific studies.
“It is hard for me to identify ocean hot spots to present to policymakers,” she said. “Now I have the capacity to cost-effectively zoom in on my desktop and print what areas need to be conserved and what the potential impact of human activities might have on the area.”
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