In the Brazilian Amazon, meanwhile, the Surui people have used it to map their homeland and record illegal logging. Urban development researchers have used Google Earth to map areas of inadequate housing, allowing them to more effectively plan future communities. Google engineers were able to quickly update their database with the latest images, which greatly aided relief efforts.įollowing this example, agency workers used Google Earth to search for survivors of earthquakes in Haiti in 2010 and Japan in 2011. They turned to the newly-released Google Earth. In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the town of New Orleans in Louisiana when flood walls, designed to resist storm surges, failed catastrophically.Įmergency services needed to find stranded people quickly and assess how best to rescue them. One unexpected benefit of Google Earth has been its usefulness in helping people and areas affected by natural disasters. NASA satellite photo of Hurricane Katrina

Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC, via Wikimedia Commons

The three engineers left Silicon Graphics and founded their own company, Keyhole, to develop an application that would allow users to zoom in to any location on Earth from above. This demo, which they called ‘From Space to Your Face’, was a sensation wherever they showed it. The Silicon Graphics team’s ‘killer demo’ began in outer space and zoomed in to the Earth, coming to rest on their logo inside a Nintendo 64-placed on top of the Matterhorn in the Alps.

In order to advertise the lifelike textures of one of their products, a graphics processor running software called Clip Mapping, they decided to base a demonstration on the Powers of Ten flip-book. John Hanke, Mark Aubin and Brian McClendon worked for Silicon Graphics Inc, a Californian company specialising in 3D computer graphics. Their aim was to knit together digital images at different scales so seamlessly that you could zoom from one magnification to another. In the 1990s, a group of software engineers began to think about how to create digital maps from satellite photographs.

Keyhole earth viewer