How to use the Earth

Flights to Hawaii, Japan, Amsterdam, and more.

  With Google Earth, you can drop pins to mark places of interest. I've dropped more that a fair number of placemarkers on my Earth (biodegradable and fully recyclable). If the zero dimension marker isn't your style, you can try your hand with a one dimensional path. With these I've traced the flight paths of my recent world travels. But what makes my project possible are the 2 dimensional polygons. The first thing I ever made was it was the Bermuda Triangle. Three points over a large area, simple and sweet, it showed me exactly where the aliens are hiding.

The Bermuda Triangle

  But the Columbia River basin is a polygon of a unknown number of individual points connected together. And I don't think I shall start counting now, because I'm probably in the thousands. And I'm no where near complete. These polygons have a couple options that are further required to make this project possible. But let me tell you one of the more amazing abilities of Google Earth. It's fully 3D.

  You can cruise on into a city and there find the individual buildings rendered as models. Never been to New York? Curious about what the city skyline looks like from Queens? Use Google Earth to find out! But not only that, the land itself is fully rendered. Mount Everest pokes up toward the sky. The Grand Canyon is beautifully intricate.

  In your options you can also exaggerate the 3D depth to make the elevation changes extremely dramatic. This is a must for my work. I look at mountains and valleys to determine if a raindrop fell here, would it rejoin the ocean because of the Columbia?

Left: Normal Elevations. Right: Exaggerated and intense.

  So what else does the polygon do that make this project a reality? You can set what altitude they float at! Well, how does that help? you might ask.What this allows me to do is "flood" valleys on the map to see where the mountains will divide a rain cloud.

Left: The normal world. Right: Noah's world.

  Next, we'll get this party started, with where I started this project, the mouth of the Columbia River.

Happy hunting,
Brett