Explore Our Planet

Vortex street and glory off near Guadalupe Island, Mexico captured by MODIS Daily Aqua. More info about this resonance effect is available at Wikipedia and Visible Earth

I would say the situation is very scary now, … ,
even recently, one of the islands by (our) main island capital just disappeared.

It will be very sad if Tuvalu actually disappears. So we only hope that everybody makes an effort to reverse global warming — that is our only hope.

It’s just a matter of time for us to be able to prove if there is a strong case, and then definitely we will do something about that.

Like the saying goes, there is no better place than home — and of course, Tuvalu is our home. We don’t want it to disappear.

Prime Minister Toafa to Reuters in Tokyo via AlertNet

Tuvalu is a small group of islands and atolls in the southern Pacific Ocean. About 12.000 inhabitants are facing a raising ocean level. Highest elevation is 5m above sea level.

Tuvalu’s famous internet domain is .tv .

While analyzing the log files from ExploreOurPla.net I see a surprising amount of 20% are users from Poland.

You’re welcome! Too bad, I can not read any word of Polish. However I’d like to ask you for a favour: could you send me links of RSS feeds with polish news about the global environment, please.

We are testing the capabilities of the geoRSS Aggregator and want to feed it with Polish and hopefully the results are useful.

If you like to act as beta tester, use latest Firefox and enter an adress like:

http://ExploreOurPla.net/georss/feedaddress

Example: http://exploreourpla.net/georss/http://www.terradaily.com/terradaily.xml

The geoFeedExplorer should open and display the entries and geo referenced icons.

Thanks.

–noiv

In the chaos that followed the quake, rumors of an impending tsunami sent thousands of people fleeing to higher ground in cars and motorbikes. The city is around 30 kilometers (18 miles) from the sea, and more than two hours after the quake no tsunami had occurred.

The quake’s epicenter was close to the Mount Merapi volcano, which has been rumbling for weeks and sending out large clouds of hot gas and ash. Activity increased as a result of the temblor, with one eruption coming soon after the volcano sent debris some 3.5 kilometers (2 miles) down its western flank, said Subandrio, a vulcanologist monitoring the peak.

[The Jakarta Post - Deadly quake strikes Yogya]

Detailed Information at USGS, view in Explorer.

This is a nice shot from Daily Aqua taken 2006-05-25. It shows the Caribbean sea, Florida and Cuba. Sun is reflected by the water surface and the States are covered with little clouds.

For this post I first added a new category called disinformation.

Claiming to advance liberty from economy to ecology the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C. starts a campaign in 14 US cities with 2 video ads about global warming.

We believe that individuals are best helped not by government intervention, but by making their own choices in a free marketplace. [CEI]

Well, infomation is needed to make decisions, so watch the clips and decide yourself.

I’m still wondering where the audience lives which needs this kind of information. If you feel brain-washed and need an antidote go to climatecrisis.net.

In case of technical problems with the media format, choose a different one from their streams page.

During the development of the geoRSS widget for ExploreOurPla.net I used this list for testing:

It is a mixture of international ressources. Registered users can edit their feed list in the extended profile very easy. Unregistered users have a predefined list, but can browse any feed, when it is properly included in URL.

There are still some issues with Microsoft Internet Explorer, use Firefox instead to avoid them.

Just in case you are still wondering, see geoRSS in action. Next version will have different colored icons for any feed.

After a while of silent ExploreOurPla.net adapts to new Google Maps 2. Google made major changes to their code and map database. The update will give you overlays and more detailed maps.

Google Satellite Maps provides more high resolution pictures, mainly of Germany which is now 99% covered. Google Street Maps includes from Portugal to Warzawa now the bigger part of Europe.

Next days you’ll find updates here with more detailed descriptions of all new features.

Geotagged mp3 sound files from all over the world collected by the Freesound project let you feel the audio atmosphere from other countries.

Listen to japanese kids performing for Undokai, Beach ambience recorded at Playa del Medio or a Santa Clara Vanguard drum line warming up in Denver. Currently there are about 500 files and the list updates every day.

Viewing a semi transparent map on top of an other is called an overlay.

So indicates the ‘DMSP/NOAA human settlements night lights of the world’ the use of electric energy and therefore human population.

Look at both parts of Korea to get the picture. South Korea has two times more inhabitants per square kilometer, though a nearly 18 times higher electricity consumption makes the different visible.

The ‘lights’ overlay is available for all users. To avoid projection shifts with lower levels (<6) choose Landsat 7 as base map.

All maps indexed at ExploreOurPla.net are loadable as overlay, however not all support transparency. The map page now has links to load layers as base map or overlay.

In general vector maps mostly have tranparent areas, where raster maps have not.

Using multiple overlays stresses your browser and your Internet connection. With Firefox ExploreOurPla.net loads maps faster and navigates smoother. If the screens remains complete or partial grey while switching maps in Internet Explorer, zooming in and out helps to refresh.

Geonames.org has unleashed a new JSON service and syndicates RSS feeds to geoRSS-feeds.

Registered users of ExploreOurPla.net get latest news from RSS-Feeds mashup-ped with go coordinates.

When ever the service detecteds an appropiate keyword it will add latitude and longitude to the RSS-entry.

You can choose any open RSS-feed and append the URL to the list in your extended profile manager.