New imaging techniques yield HD maps of Antarctica

[pscot]

Click the link. The images are very cool.

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=32146

Maps of Antarctica date back to when Roman geographer and astronomer Ptolemy envisioned a land in the southern hemisphere to counterbalance that in the north to satisfy an ancient sense of proportion. Terra Australis would remain terra incognita for more than 1,500 years, though that didn't stop cartographers from drawing fanciful depictions of the southern continent, varying widely in size and location.

Today, the average person can zoom across Antarctica with Google Earth. It's even possible to download high-definition images of ice and mountaintops thanks to an International Polar Year project that created a map mosaic of the continent from more than 1,000 satellite images -- the Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA) . But Paul Morin knows those images and the maps created from them can get even better, practically proselytizing about a new promised land of high-resolution imagery in which one can literally count the boulders on the ground.

Morin, at the University of Minnesota , is the principal investigator for the Antarctic Geospatial Information Center (AGIC) , a National Science Foundation-funded project to archive and create just about anything to do with maps and imagery of Antarctica for science and logistics. His team, which includes only one full-time person, has digitally archived, with assistance from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Antarctic Resource Center and EROS Data Center , more than 330,000 aerial photographs of Antarctica at a resolution of 300 dots per inch (dpi). The USGS is continuing to rescan each image at a resolution of 25 microns (a quarter the width of a human hair) over the next 12 months.

"It's Antarctica from 1947 to the year 2000, at anywhere from 20 centimeters to a two meter resolution per pixel. The entire collection fits on a single hard disk" Morin explained. The historical aerial shots complement a rapidly growing, mind-boggling large reservoir of high-resolution imagery of Antarctica being taken almost daily now by a suite of commercial satellites, according to Morin. For instance, each individual pixel from a satellite called Worldview is about the size of a plastic grocery bag.

"We can actually see the tents in individual field camps," Morin said. "Think of these satellites as on-demand air photography anywhere in Antarctica"

[comtec]

1. um.. wow!!!

that's kewl!
and depressing when you see how little ice is left.