Jude 2

I've been wanting to find a globe like this and finally went looking for one. You can turn it and spin it with your mouse. This one is pretty good, but there is no zoom. Does anyone know of a better one than this? I don't mean maps, but globes that you can spin in any direction.

http://earth.watype.net/en/globe/

I am surprised at how much greener the northern tundra is than the Eastern United States, and by how little jungle there is in Africa compared to South America.

Tim there is a zoom, a slider handle, it's located on the right hand side of the screen. However the closest you can come to the earth (altitude) is 5000 km, so your not going to get really high detail.


TW

If you get a Wii and hook it up to your internet connection, there's a forecast channel that you can view the whole earth's weather with. A globe that you can zoom way out with allows you to grab and spin that sucker. Great fun to do it, and my daughter likes to check out weather around the world sometimes just to "spin the earth", as she calls it.

TW wrote:Tim there is a zoom, a slider handle, it's located on the right hand side of the screen. However the closest you can come to the earth (altitude) is 5000 km, so your not going to get really high detail.

TW, thanks for pointing that out. I see what you mean: the resolution doesn't change as you zoom.

It amazes me that from the western coast of the United States to the coast of China is more or less a straight vector along the British Columbian, Alaskan, and Siberian coastlines around a circumference of the planet.

Another amazing thing is how large the Pacific Ocean is. Holy cow, it's huge!

2 things came to my attention very quickly as I viewed this (thanks by the way Tim).

1. Africa has much less jungle that I thought and lots of desert. Why has their landscape so eroded or is it that I just had a preconceived notion of how it was?

2. There is much more ice at the South Pole than the North. I don't for a minute believe that it is because of global warming because if the ice melts then there would not be greenery and trees left behind. Also as you pointed out Tim the Northern Hemisphere is full of trees and therefore full of Carbon Dioxide breathing plants so why should we believe the Nordic Ice is melting due to CO2?

Danny, To address your questions about the ice caps at the poles. The North Pole is located at sea level over an open ocean that acts as a heat reservoir, which makes it significantly warmer than the South Pole that is at altitude on a continental land mass. Here's a couple of screen grabs to show what I mean.

The North Pole



The South Pole



I have marked the pole locations, and outlined the land major masses. The colder year round climate at the South Pole would go a long way in explaining the difference in ice accumulation.


TW