![]() Aircraft are parked there and broken down to be salvaged or scrapped. The Davis-Monthan Air Force Base just outside Tucson, Ariz., is home to more than 4,000 military aircraft. Not the only shipwreck visible on Google Earth, the 264-foot ship is, however, one of the largest. Jassim, a Bolivian cargo ferry, ran aground off the coast of Sudan. It seems unlikely that a $2.3 million project (in 1969 dollars) would be built without at least glancing at some blueprints. Others have pointed out, however, that standard architectural practice would involve the creation and review of both two- and three-dimensional plans. Built in the late 1960s, the Navy contended that the swastika-shaped design was unintentional. But with an estimated $600,000 price tag for a redesign, the structure has still not been changed. More complaints followed, and in 2007 the Navy said it would do something about it. “This is not the type of message America needs to be sending to the world.” ![]() ”I’m concerned about symbolism,” von Kleist told the Los Angeles Times. Former host of The Power Hour radio program Dave von Kleist voiced his objection to the buildings on air. But in 2006, a view from Google Earth’s cameras showed that its four L-shaped buildings form the shape of a swastika. Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado, Calif., looks unremarkable from the ground. Google Earth did pick it up and it’s still viewable today. “Maybe the Google Earth cameras picked it up!” the project’s page reads. The team contracted a plane and a helicopter to help document their progress. In 2006, a group of students from Oregon State University made a 220-foot-wide crop circle in the shape of the logo for the Mozilla Firefox Web browser. Google Earth isn’t all prison camps and rainforest devastation, though. “Google’s technology plays an important role in helping build a better future - a future with a conscience,” said Chief Almir Surui on one of Google’s promotional pages. In 2007, the tribal leader of the Surui people in Brazil learned of Google Earth during a visit to an Internet café and has since started using Google Earth to ensure a sustainable future for his people. Google Earth is also used to identify illegal logging in locations like the Amazon rainforest. The scientists reported that every country in the region, except Kuwait, has been grossly under-reporting their catches, in some cases reporting well under half of what is actually being caught. Scientists used Google Earth’s ruler tool to measure the size of each trap and then calculated the daily catch based on historical records, length of the fishing season and composition of fish species present at each location. ![]() “This is particularly important in the case of the Persian Gulf, where fisheries are the second most important natural resource after oil.” “Underreporting fish catches can jeopardize a country’s food security, economy, not to mention impact entire marine ecosystems,” a researcher told Quartz. Most recently, researchers used Google Earth to uncover that many countries around the Persian Gulf have been under-reporting how many fish they’re catching to the U.N. Google Earth has revealed a lot since it was introduced in 2001, from nude backyard sunbathers to North Korea’s expansive prison camps where an estimated 200,000 live and 400,000 have died. The truth has a funny way of coming out when there’s a camera in the sky taking pictures of, well, everything.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |