The Google Earth facility is a powerful GIS tool which is very "approachable" and intuitive to casual users. Google Earth (GE) can be obtained at GoogleEarth.com. We have an interesting discussion of the Pleistocene - Holocene Boundary and how Google Earth was leveraged in the Inferred Alignment section of the Saginaw Manifold chapter.
The identification of Perigee: Zero ejecta and crater landforms can be accomplished easily using GE. Annotation of each location with structural characteristics and linking information are all easily accomplished. The resulting database can be managed as a structured medadata text file, which is easily distributed to other collaborative users. As we build the database of these elements, we will offer our viewers access to the "Keyhole Markup Language", or KML file. A zipped version , KMZ, of these files are also available. A benefit of the zipped file is that the relevant overlay images can be imbedded in the structure.
Our overlays are quite small and limited in number. The KML version reference internet connections to load the overlays from our central PerigeeZero.org site, while the KMZ will have them imbedded. We off our collection of KMZ files on our KMZ Downloads page.
As an example, we present here composites of an ejecta structures using Google Earth . We show a snapshot here in these pages for your convenience, but we strongly suggest the supplied KMZ file is used with Google Earth to display these mappings. Using G, the overlay for each landform can be switched on and off to validate the alignment choices we have made.
The process can easily continue, resulting in large numbers of correlation structures. Each addition ejecta signature form adds to the case for the hypothesis. The process can be performed across the globe, with the same startling results. Google earth has become an efficient way for us to organize and access the data sets as they are built and evaluated.
