Smithsonian Institution - Global Volcanism Program: Worldwide Holocene Volcano and Eruption Information. Volcans du monde. Getty Thesaurus Of Geographic Names Online. Grab Google Earth Coordinates Into Your Windows Clipboad. The GE Coords program simplifies the job of grabbing coordinates for a point in Google Earth, and putting them into your clipboard, from where you can paste them into the application of your choice.
Not terribly complicated to use (and the website has more complete instructions if you need them): 1. Install the program (you’ll find it in the “Thots Utilities” folder) 2. Fire up Google Earth, press the yellow pushpin icon on the toolbar, and drag it to your desired location: 3. 4. But running the program without any placemark code in the clipboard brings up the option to “Setup” the desired default coordinate format:
Neptune and Uranus May Have Oceans of Liquid Diamond. Future humans won't have to wait to travel to Pandora for the chance to mine unobtanium, because Neptune and Uranus may have diamond icebergs floating atop liquid diamond seas closer to home.
The surprise finding comes from the first detailed measurements of the melting point of diamond, Discovery News reports. Scientists zapped diamond with a laser at pressures 40 million times greater than the Earth's atmosphere at sea level, and then slowly reduced both temperature and pressure. They eventually found that diamond behaves like water during freezing and melting, and that chunks of diamond will float in the liquid diamond. Diamond oceans could explain why the magnetic fields of Uranus and Neptune appear tilted so far off their north-south axes, given that they could deflect or tilt the magnetic fields.
Both planets may consist of up to 10 percent carbon, the elemental building block of diamond. [via Discovery News] Proof of Life in Three Martian Rocks May Come This Year. Monoliths may not have transformed Jupiter into a star and made Europa a new Earth, but the late science fiction author Arthur C.
Clarke might still be pleased, wherever he is, with NASA's prediction for 2010. Spaceflight Now reports that this year should prove whether fossilized life truly exists in three Martian meteorites, one way or the other. Scientists have been reexamining the controversial Allen Hills meteorite since it sparked reaction from both NASA and the White House in 1996. But now better instruments have turned up possible Martian fossils inside two more meteorites, including a chunk of space rock that has sat inside the British Museum of Natural History in London for almost 100 years.
The scientific teams are "very, very close to proving there is or has been life [on Mars]," said David McKay, chief of astrobiology at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, in a Spaceflight Now interview. [Spaceflight Now] Google Earth Images Confirm Mythological Meteor Impact. Australian Aborigine mythology begins in a period known as the "dream time", before the emergence of humanity.
Many stories about the dream time include legends about stars, gods, or rocks falling from the sky. And new research utilizing Google Earth surveys of the outback show that many of those myths may actually be historically accurate. Writing in the journals Archaeoastronomy and Meteoritics and Planetary Science, Duane Hamacher, an astrophysicist Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, describes how examination of Aborigine myths led him to discover previously unidentified blast crater about 81 miles south of the town of Alice Springs. In the myth, a star falls to Earth at a site the Arrernte tribe call Puka. Hamacher located the Puka site on Google Maps, and sure enough, the image looked just like another blast crater, Gosse's Bluff, which is located just west of Alice Springs and part of another Aborigine myth about something falling from the sky (this time a giant baby). 60 satellite images of Earth Boing Boing.
Eruptions. Increasing signs of activity at Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland : Eruptions.