Collapse of the Wilkins ice shelf?

Usually 'scientific' stories like these fail to hit the headlines, unless accompanied by some wild doom and gloom headlines or miracle diet. The BBC however ran this story last week after capturing some video footage of the Wilkins Ice Shelf collapse. Further press reports by The Guardian, The Times and CNN brought the story into the mainstream, placing the blame firmly at the hands of global warming (who or what else?).


source: National Snow and Ice Data Center

Rather than just read-about it, a number of GE Community Members contributed to KML links showing imagery in Google Earth, some of them over time. My favourite KML though is the delightfully simple effort by NASA to compile four images showing the moment of the breakup, and the end result just over two weeks later. Samples below.



Of course, Ogle Earth had the best round-up, with some nice embedded videos and it's own KML file. For an overview of the different ice shelves and excellent links to imagery, you could do worse than the National Snow and Ice Data Center's compilation of it's Antarctic data sets. Plenty of images available there to import into a virtual globe there!

The big secret news was...

ESRI holdings strengthens position as market leader in GIS with GeoWise acquisition. As I can't really say anything impartial, I guess I'll just leave it as that :)

A day at Glen Dollar - kml and photos

After a frantic week at work (major releases and major announcements (about which I can say nothing!)) - I decided to have a couple of hours to myself. As it was blowing a gale and in my rush to get away I had forgotten my hat, I opted to visit Glen Dollar. I've been meaning to walk around there for ages, but for whatever reason I've never taken the time too. It's a shame, as it's really quite accessible from Edinburgh, and after a day of rain (like when I went), it turns into an absolutely stunning little gorge, with waterfalls, lush vegetation and a majestic castle dominating the skyline.



Rather than post the pictures on here directly (bar the one above), I've compiled a little kml to show the location of the route and where a few of the photos were taken from.

Oh, a few weeks ago I went to seeEd Parsons give a presentation at the Edinburgh Earth Observatory series of seminars, at the Institute of Geography, Edinburgh. While it was an excellent presentation which I think the whole audience thoroughly enjoyed, he didn't really cover anything new, groundbreaking, or terribly exciting - hence why I haven't really bothered to blog about it 'till now. As the main focus was on Google Earth, I'm not really complaining - it was very enjoyable. Thanks for making the effort to come up Ed.