The Google Earth Browser Plugin is now live at http://code.google.com/apis/earth. Download it, learn from the online Developer Guide and samples, build something cool, and share it with the world!
Today we are pleased that the British Government is launching with Google Earth Outreach, and in collaboration with the Met Office Hadley Centre and the British Antarctic Survey, new layers in Google Earth that utilize geographical information to show how climate change will affect our planet and its people.
The Met Office Hadley Centre has produced a layer which illustrates their future temperature modeling, showing an animation of temperature change over the next hundred years and its impact to particular parts of the world.
The scientists of the British Antarctic Survey have developed a layer which details how they monitor and measure the effects of climate change in Antarctica, featuring stunning images that show the retreat of the ice from this environmentally-sensitive continent.
Featured on our Google Earth Outreach Showcase, which provides more than 100 examples of KML content telling stories about our planet, are these two layers: Climate Change in Our World and Climate Change in Our World, Antarctica. These two KML files offer a unique distillation of informed, scientific and geographically-organized information demonstrating the commitment by the British Government to continue to carry out this important climate research and to communicate the results of the research by making this information readily accessible.
Update (5/20, 4pm): You can view Prime Minister Brown's announcement of this initiative:
These maps are provided as overlays, and some features of Google Maps are not available - most notably, these maps are not searchable or routable. However, they do contain the significant cities, towns, villages, roads, and landmarks in the region, including medical facilities, which can be very helpful in planning and delivering relief to the affected population.
This mapplet will be updated as new data becomes available. Satellite images and other information are available as KML layers for Google Earth.
In just a matter of days, they were able to convert their existing JavaScript + Flash application to take advantage of this new API and provide their users with an updated experience. To find out more, check out what our developer team has to say and peruse the API documentation.
We're also taking this opportunity to test our new face-blurring technology on the busy streets of Manhattan. This effort has been a year in the making -- working at Street View-scale is a tough challenge that required us to advance state-of-the-art automatic face detection, and we continue working hard to improve it as we roll it out for our existing and future imagery. Here are just a couple examples from the bustling streets of Manhattan:
