Google to launch next big update to Google Earth

On February 2nd, Google is presenting a new version of Google Earth at the California Academy of Sciences, an aquarium, planetarium and natural history museum in San Francisco. This is the perfect location for them to unveil what I suspect will be what people are calling "Google Ocean".

If you look at maps in Google Maps, or Google Earth, you can see that they have already updated imagery for the ocean floor -- but it could be so much better.

Many suspect that we could be days away from seeing a 3D ocean view -- the ability to fly across the ocean floor is something that researchers would absolutely love to be able to do.

It's very unlikely that we're going to see much high resolution imagery (but I would be surprised if there was none), because that information simply does not exist yet, and it's difficult and expensive to obtain. It would take 100 ships a whole year to get the type of information needed.

"We hope that one of the outcomes of Google Ocean will be an understanding of how much remains to be explored," said Miller of Scripps. "We know far more about the surface of Mars from a few weeks of radar surveying in orbit than we know of the bottom of the ocean after two centuries." -- CNET

Google Earth is becoming an excellent tool for researchers to collaborate on anything from space to the depths of our oceans.