Google Earth takes the plunge, upgrades to add world's seas

Two and a half years ago, the software engineers behind Google Earth, the searchable online replica of the planet, were poised to fill an enormous data gap, adding the two-thirds of the globe that is covered by water in reality and was blue, and blank, online.

But until then, all of the existing features on Google Earth — mountains, valleys, cities, plains, ice sheets — were built through programming from an elevation of zero up.

"We had this arbitrary distinction that if it was below sea level it didn't count," recalled John Hanke, the Internet entrepreneur who co-created the progenitor of Google Earth, called Keyhole, and moved to Google when the company bought his company in 2004.

That oversight had to be fixed before the months and months of new programming and data collection could culminate in the creation of simulated oceans. The oceans are the most significant of several upgrades introduced Monday in Google Earth, with the new version downloadable free at earth.google.com, according to the company.

Another feature, Historical Imagery, provides the ability to scroll back through decades of satellite images and watch the spread of suburbia or erosion of coasts.

Click a function called Touring and you can create narrated, illustrated tours, on land or above and below the sea surface, describing and showing things like a hiking or scuba excursion, or even a research cruise on a deep-diving submarine.

The two-year push to fill in the giant blue blanks came through a chance encounter in March 2006. Hanke was poised to receive an award from the Geographical Society of Spain for his pioneering work building Web-based models of the planet.

But he was preceded at the dais by Sylvia Earle, a former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who was there to receive her own award, for deep-sea exploration and popularizing ocean science.

She turned to him and said she loved the way Google Earth allowed users to see how one thing relates to another on the planet.

But Earle bluntly added: "You've done a great job with the dirt. But what about the water?"

Since that time, Earle and Hanke have been partners in the long effort, as she explained, "to make sure the mountains don't end at the beach."

She assembled an advisory panel including Jane Lubchenco, the Oregon State University marine biologist since chosen by President Obama to head the oceanic and atmospheric agency.

"I've been struggling my whole life to figure out how to reach people and get them to understand they're connected to the ocean," Earle said.

"But I go to the supermarket and still see the United Nations of fish for sale," she said. "Marine sanctuaries are still not really protected. Google Earth gets all this information now and puts it in one place for the littlest kid and the stuffiest grown-up to see in a way that hasn't been possible in all preceding history."

The addition of the oceans posed many technical hurdles, not the least being aligning disparate data sets so water meets land in the right places, Google engineers said.

Other snags will almost certainly pop up as millions of users scour the new terrain.

But many of the ocean scientists who quietly worked with Google over the last two years to pull together vast data sets are elated at the prospect of the seas' getting new visibility, and respect.

"It's a way of raising awareness from thousands to billions overnight," said Richard Spinrad, the NOAA assistant administrator for research, who served on an advisory panel.