Link to Google Earth Gadget |
- Temporary Places
- > Rising Sea Level Animation
- >> Changing Sea Level by 1 m by BZoltan Hungary
- >>> Data 1-100m
Google Earth Sidebar |
Each level in the application is a sphere wrapping around the entire globe. The lowest level is a sphere 1 metre higher than present sea level and the largest sphere is 100 metres higher, so it allows you to visualize coastlines anywhere from 1m to 100m higher than present. Unfortunately, it doesn't help with lowering sea levels and mapping coastlines that were lower than present. The default colour of the spheres is pink. I'd love to be able to change that if some knows what button to click.
Toporama. I traced the 4 meter contour interval by hand on screen to make this map. There's a little bit of labour involved, but I couldn't do it automatically because the part of the map that I'm most interested in connects the ocean coastline to a freshwater pond to create an island. Incorporating freshwater features into sea level models is something that these programs seem to have trouble doing on their own. I feel a little more confident about the results from the Toporama map, because it matches my memory of the actual lay of the land a little better. For this map, I'm trying to illustrate how Maritime Archaic sites located in the red circle would have actually been sitting on a small island when they were occupied. Today they are on the mainland. Generally, both maps illustrate that point, although the Google Earth app distorts the shape of the island a bit. Interestingly, the maps generated in Google Earth for 2-3m above sea level match the 4m map from Toporama more closely than the 4m map it produced. If Toporama and Google Earth are out of sync by 1 or 2 metres, but otherwise the same, then it might just be that they use a slightly different definition of sea level.
Edit: I forgot to mention - you can improve the results of the Google Earth gadget by opening Tools >> Options and dragging the Terrain Quality slider all the way to the right to create higher terrain quality. Also, you can try increasing the Elevation Exaggeration in the same window.
Photo Credits:
1-3,5: screen grabs from Google Earth.
4: map based on data from Toporama.
This is awesome Tim! Very useful :) Perfect Christmas gift for those hard to shop for archy's.
ReplyDeleteAinslie
Plus its free! Er - I mean - Merry Christmas everyone I hope its your size!
ReplyDeleteIts especially fun playing with it on sites farther north when you can crank it up to 50 or 60 masl and send all those mountaintop pre-Dorset sites out onto islands where they belong.
Really neat Tim - I'll be downloading the GE tool.
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