Family Tech: Around the world with Google Earth

PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY, Va. -- I escaped the biting cold in Woodbridge to the beaches of Tahiti, and a few minutes later, the warm waters of the Great Barrier Reef. I’ve taken a look at Bejing’s Forbidden City, checked out the historic airplanes at Tucson’s Pima Air Museum, moved between the buildings of Manhattan, gazed at Big Ben in London and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. And I did all of those things in the last hour.

I’ve been wasting time again in Google Earth, another free application from the search giant. Google Earth is a virtual globe on your computer. You zoom in to and see amazing details from its commercially available satellite imagery. I zoomed in on the house I lived in as a teen to see how much the trees have grown. You can go places in Google Earth you cannot go in real life. Want to check out the private Malibu Colony? Visit Easter Island or the now closed Johnson Atoll? Or take a closeup look of John Travolta’s home in Florida with the runway next to it and his Boeing 707 parked next to the house? I’ve seen how the homes are laid out in the Kennedy Compound in Hyannisport, and gazed down at places I do not want to go like Plum Island off Long Island, mentioned in “The Silence of the Lambs” as a biological research station.

There are Web sites that will tell you where to look in Google Earth for airplanes in flight. Other Web sites have oddities found around the world and visible in Google Earth.

There has been archaeological discoveries made using Google Earth. Just this last week, researchers announced they may have found the famed El Dorado in the Amazon basin near the Brazil/Bolivia border. Over 200 earthworks seen on Google Earth have inspired further searches on the ground.

Google Earth can even be used to track breaking news. A new layer came out Thursday showing imagery of Haiti taken after last week’s earthquake, showing the damaged areas.

You can dive below the ocean to see the ocean bottom’s terrain. Sister products Google Moon and Google Mars let you explore those bodies. And Google Sky lets you gaze at the stars and see them as they would be at different times, and from different places.

Teachers are using Google Earth in the classroom to teach geography.

For fun, there is a flight simulator game built in to Google Earth.

Check out the links page for where to download Google Earth and a wealth of Web sites with interesting places to look, and layers, known as KML files, to download to show you special treats in Google Earth.

Links for items mentioned in this column can be found at: http://bit.ly/FamilyTech Mark’s blog is at http://markstout.blogspot.com and his e-mail address is markstout @gmail.com.