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About the IPY Layer

Creation of this layer was made possible through the contributions of numerous individuals.

For the past few years, EarthSLOT's mission has been to create better access to polar data and promote virtual globes within earth sciences. At a session we convened at the Fall AGU in 2006, we had the opportunity to put the IPY headquarters team (David Carlson and Rhian Salmon) in touch with the Google Earth development team (Rebecca Moore and Brian McClendon). They hit it off well, and after a lunch on Google Campus all agreed that including an IPY layer in Google Earth was a great idea.

Six weeks and several telecons later, a small team was formed to create the layer, with goal of having something useable by the March 1 launch. The EarthSLOT team (which was at the time was just me, Matt Nolan) took on the task of leading the development efforts, including coming up with an architecture and first two Tours by March 1. Realizing I was quite over my head (especially considering this was evening and weekend work), I convinced Erik Gregg of GINA to help out with the Project Tour folder. He soon realized he too was in over his head, and convinced Kristen Shake to help with manually encoding the spatial coordinates for each project. I later went through most of the Arctic projects, fixed geolocations when necessary and varied the zooms and tilts of the viewpoints to make the tour more interesting visually; this still needs to be done for the Antartic and Bipolar Tours. Stefan Geens of Ogleearth worked on developing some style templates for the pages. Lisa Ballagh and Ross Swick at NSIDC developed a "How to create KML" book for scientists wanting to contribute to the effort. Several iterations later, it seems to all be coming together in time for the March 1 launch.

If you found this layer useful, please feel free to email any of us (or all of us) and let us know.

If you really found this layer useful, email my boss and feel free to tell him he should keep me around.
If you really really found this layer useful, email his bosses and feel free to tell them to buy me an airplane and lidar to measure the impacts of climate change on arctic topography.
If you really really really found this layer useful and want more like this, email these guys and feel free to tell them to fund us to do it.

Copyright notices:

TerraExplorer, TerraExplorer Pro, TerraGate, TerraPhoto, and TerraBuilder are registered trademarks of Skyline Software Inc.

GoogleEarth, GoogleEarth Plus, and GoogleEarth Pro are registered trademarks of Google.

Note: This material is based upon work supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

No warranty: Data is provided "as is," without any warranty whatsoever, including but not limited to any warranty as to performance, merchantability, or fitness for any particular purpose.

Liability: The entire risk as to the results of the use of this data is assumed by the user. EarthSLOT is not responsible for any interpretation or conclusions made by those who acquire or use it. EarthSLOT shall not be liable for any direct, indirect, special, incidental, compensatory or consequential damages or third-party claims resulting from the use of this data, even if EarthSLOT has been advised of the possibility of such potential loss or damage. In states that do not allow the exclusion or limitation of incidental or consequential damages, this data may not be used.

(c) 2004 Matt Nolan. Please contact us with questions, comments, or compliments.