Google Earth Community: Dogsled on Svalbard

ploppy:

You've brought up a couple of important issues here:

"I took a screenshot myself for the same fear of losing it to an update but didn't think about posting it as an overlay".

Placemarks that we create to mark observations that we have made on the current imagery are data (our interpretations and added knowledge) derived from or related to other data (the imagery). How can we best preserve the relationship between the two? The placemarks do not automatically contain any metadata that ties them to the specific imagery that they are meant to annotate. For the Google Earth Community Forums, what could serve as a sort of metadata is the date of the post. We could theoretically use that date to refer back to the appropriate imagery, if Google were to archive old imagery and make it available after updates. But if we save a local copy of a kmz file from a post, the connection gets somewhat lost. We could put TimeStamp markup in placemarks that we create to record the date of creation, but I think we would have to do that manually by editing the kml directly. Posting a screen capture of the imagery in the narrative of the post helps, and some people do this, but the location and orientation information may be a bit imprecise that way. I wonder whether this issue matters to most of the Google Earth Community. I think it will matter as time elapses and an increasing proportion of the placemarks in posts lose their connection to the then current imagery.

"It may not be just a Google Earth update we have to worry about. With global warming and scientist second guessing what may or may not happen with the Gulf Stream, Arctic meltwater and jet streams the Earth itself may do the updating for us".

Some of the changes taking place are sad and frightening. Cherished ways of life are being lost, and even those of us who are well-off now may someday find ourselves hit by climate change and shortages of energy, food, and critical materials. Species and natural habitats are being lost. Solutions to these problems are complex, and need to be informed by a perspective that crosses disciplinary boundaries. But most education seems quite compartmentalized, so people typically do not make thinking about these issues a habitual part of their lives. I hope this changes. Google Earth seems a good venue for promoting a cross-disciplinary perspective, since it can be used to put diverse datasets from multiple sources together geographically.