EXPLORE   WITH FRED  Intrepid Net Mariner Voyages to Edge of Envelope  by Fred Hapgood

This portion of the Website charts trends in and resources for the expression of green values on the Net/Web. The two themes addressed so far are The Earth Mirror and Underground. Others will be added in time. (FH)

 

The Earth Mirror

 

Introduction

In 1990 Yale University computer scientist David Gelernter suggested
monitoring large organizations with what he called "mirrorworlds": complex, highly graphical representations of the information flows and physical activities of institutions and their parts. (Mirror Worlds, Oxford University Press).

While Gelernter was concerned with understanding the lives of institutions it is possible to imagine an environmental implementation of his idea: a single data lens or window that would allow everyone to monitor events of any kind at every point or series of points on the earth, over either time or space, and then report on those events in any desired language, specialization, or sophistication. In short: an Earth Mirror.

Actually building an Earth Mirror would be an immense undertaking. Many of its modalities, such as imaging pollutant plumes,  species distributions, seismic activity, and microclimates, to mention just a few, would require distributing huge arrays of sensors over large areas.  Equally vast libraries of routines will be needed to gather the data flowing from those sensors, process it into information that people could use,  and publish it on the net.  Monitoring and organizing the resources published on the internet and making those resources known to all the relevant constituencies would be a third labor of Hercules.

Nonetheless, today thousands of sites can be found organized around
some facet of  the idea.   These are the seeds around which the Earth Mirror is beginning to crystallize. The following is a tour through these sites.
 

                            The Tour
 

Local Imaging

Imagine a display  "through" which you could watch a specific point on the globe (like a rain forest) in real time.   (It might hang on a wall,  looking much like an ordinary window.)  Done right, this display would offer a new way for  the citizens of the globe to bond with the planet's landscapes.

We are not there yet: just on the hardware end, such a service would
(probably) require broadband connectivity, cheap flat-panel displays, and  better digital cameras, all at an affordable price.  Such a package is years away.

Still, people are coming as close to this service as they can.  Several dozen landscape-oriented "webcams" -- digital cameras that take pictures of a scene at rates varying from a few per day to a few per second -- have opened around the world.  Illustrative examples include The Sulphur Mountain Webcam (AKA "Eye on Banff"), the Great South Bay Cam,  the cams  pointing to Mt. Shasta and Mt. Umunhum,  and Antarcticacams like the one at Mawson Station  (The last time I checked I was warned that "winds over 100 kph were causing distortion and camera shake").   The technowhiz award goes to Missouri's Lake of the Ozarks, which delivers not only visuals but several other measurements of the lake (level, temperature, moon phase, etc).  WebCam Central lists outdoor scenes, while Tracy Marks' WebWinds  pays special attention to natural landscapes (as opposed to urban scenes).  A master list of volanocams can be found at North Dakota State University's compendious VolcanoWorld, where you can sign up for an eruption alert.

Advice on operating cams can be found on many sites.  Karen Bell, creator of  The Fishy Cam, shows what can be done for a few bucks.
Perceptual Robotics  makes cams for the carriage trade.  Check out their incredibly cute tigercubcam demo (8am-5pm EST only).

There are a handful of animal cams,  though of course since animals
move around the constraints on the technology are tighter.  Much can be done even so: the several falconcams that point through office windows at falcon nests, such as Transarc's FalconVision, catch  some marvelous
images during the few months when fledging falcons are being raised.
(At other times albums of  baby falcon photos are on view)   The National Zoo lets those viewing its several animal cams (The Amazing Updating Elephant Cam, The Naked Mole-Rat Cam, and The Rhino Calf Cam) open a 'floating remote' window that can be minimized, and parked up in the corner of the screen, and left running during work sessions.  (In most cams minimizing trashes the image.)  This comes close to allowing a viewer to keep a casual eye on the comings and goings of an animal continuously, all during the day.  Videoconferencing sessions -- virtual field trips -- are available for educational institutions.

Eventually cams will be carried by animals, allowing us to immerse ourselves in their lives to pet-like levels of intensity.   Some are already carrying radio transmitters.  Wild Wings Heading North documents
a program in which radio transmitters were used to track ther migrations of Snow Geese during the first half of 1997.  Another is the Sea Turtle Survival League's site, where the travels of several sea turtles can be followed online.  Both sites support extensive educational services.

There are not many gardencams yet, though as The Amazing Lillycam,
demonstrates the possibilities are there (this being March, you will have to look in the archives to survey them).  The most famous internet garden is the Telegarden, which allows people to garden over the web using teleoperated devices.  The idea, the originators explain, is "to explore a post-Nomadic motif where planting and agri-culture require spatial and temporal continuity."  So there you have it.  Cam issues aside, the best garden site is probably  Seiwa-en, a Japanese garden at the Missouri Botanical Gardens in St. Louis.

Part of the ideal would be to able to 'turn your head' -- scroll a scene past a viewing window through a complete 360 degrees.  (Examples of the potential  are the desert landscapes found in the DesertUSA site and these views of the gardens maintained by the Fairchild Tropical Gardens.)  Up until recently the only way of making panoramas was by piecing images together, which was time consuming and expensive.  Recently  two companies have started offering lenses that do panoramas in a single exposure: Cyclovision and  BeHere (Company motto: "You always thought the world revolved around you; now it does.")   As competition for this market increases so will the number of panoramic landscapes online.

At present almost all wide-angle content is read from a disk, as opposed to coming in live.  Pointable or steerable cams allow live feeds over wide fields of view, but only one person on the internet can "hold the controls" at any one time.  Behere Co. is working on a panoramic video lens.  When realized, and assuming enough bandwidth, such a device should allow any number of users to scroll simultaneously through a realtime panorama in any direction they might like.

By definition panoramas revolve around a fixed point; you cannot use
them to drive through a landscape in 3-D.  One interesting attempt to break out of this limitation can be found at Virtual Birder, which builds Myst-like 'slide-show' tours out of very large numbers of  still photos.  These photos are used to recreate the partings and joinings of paths, allowing users to make different choices when they retrace their steps.  Classy material.  By contrast, while the World Wildlife Fund has some nice slide shows of various animals on their site, the slides do not form a geographically coherent narrative. They might as well be a spread in a print magazine.  Eventually camera-toting robots will supply 3-D tours in realtime for a few select landscapes (such as the deserts of Antarctica).  NASA's Long Range Science Rover is an example of one such platform.

None of these realtime views come with  realtime sound.  Why not I do not know.  The technology is there: bird houses and bird feeders with wireless microphones are not hard to find. (You can even get feeders with videocams and microphones in a single package.)  In fact there are no realtime audio feeds of natural sounds anywhere, with or without a cam, and only one example of a landscape cam using stored natural sound to enhance the visuals: The Amazing Lillycam has a file of bullfrog calls.  That's about it.  Not even Sheraton's Fallscam (showcasing Niagara Falls) has a sound track, live or stored, which you'd think would be pretty obvious.  I am also looking for and not finding experiments in using sounds as interfaces for monitoring natural events, for instance, by having virtual wind chimes running off  networked anemometers or vanes (or both).  This would allow the winds of Greece, or Japan, or Alaska to play (software-based) windchimes in your desktop.

VirtualBirder and Seiwa-en, both already mentioned, have nice integrations of sound with static visuals, which is a start.  Some birder sites have archives of bird songs tied to pictures of the appropriate birds.  One of the best of these is Tony Phillip's Songs and Calls of some New York Birds, which has a nice set of links to other birdsong archives.

Companies that sell CDs of natural sound sometimes give samples away online as come-ons (Natural Sound being a case in point). There is at least one company that sells software that simulates natural sounds.  The prize for most innovative use of natural sound probably goes to the USGS for its tutorial on Listening to Earthquakes.  A must-hear.
 
Two other frontiers barely explored  are microscopic landscapes and
underwater imaging with sound.  MIT's Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Lab is hoping to use untethered, unmanned, underwater vehicles as instrument platforms to this end. Success would allow imaging of scenes far underneath the ocean's surface.
 
 
Remote Imaging 

Perhaps the resources that currently come closest to the Earth Mirror concept are the archives of satellite photos. (The best we have so far
as live orbital imagery goes, at least for free, are the weather satellite sites, none of which refresh faster than around two frames an hour.)   Pride of place in these archives goes to USGS's Earthshots.  This site is a good tool for environmentalists: it allows users to track man-made and natural changes on the Earth by comparing photos of the same place taken at several different times.  Mauritania's Natl. Hwy. 2  is a representative case.  Images of exceptional aesthetic quality and/or historical significance can be viewed and ordered online.

NOAA's Geostationary Satellite Server specializes in images of places in the news (fires, flooding, snowstorms).  Note especially the  pictures of the Indonesian fires and the Montserrat Volcano.  Martin Fowler has put together a nice site on the archeological applications of orbital sensing.   NASA recently launched an ocean color monitoring satellite -- called SeaWiFS, for Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor -- to track changes in the types and distribution of marine phytoplankton. The images in the Gallery are not to be missed.

Other approaches to archiving and presenting orbital imagery can be found at EarthRISE and Badger.   EarthRISE, which is made up
from photos taken by astronauts as opposed to satellites, supports text
searches on either political entities or topographical features. While Badger's archives are geographically narrow (focused on the Bay Area), the navigational features are cutting edge: users can select photos by street addresses, zip codes, landmarks, etc. Badger also carries illustrations of how satellite photos might be used for environmental management and the prediction of  events of interest, such as fire hazards or storm water discharge peaks.

Over the next five to ten years the degree of coverage available from orbit, both in real time and from archives, should increase enormously.  At least three industrial groups (Space Imaging, Raytheon's E-Systems Corp., and Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Orbimage) are planning and launching for-profit civilian eye-in-the-sky projects.  Imagery is already beginning to appear on these sites, including support of such features of interest as automatic flagging of man-made or natural alterations.  Microsoft, Digital, the Russian Space Agency, and a small company called Aerial Imagery are collaborating on building a server that will be give quick access to a terabyte of orbital imagery data.  Now in Beta.

Tremendous amounts of material are being generated as well by the world's several meteorological satellites. A Pennsylvania high school named L. David Baron has pulled these resources together into The International Weather Satellite Imaging Center.  World Weather Links is another encyclopedic collection of links (orbital images, animation, radar, forecasts, cameras, and storm views).  Changes over the past few hours can be seen on a time lapse loop of orbital imagery on The Weather Channel.

Remote imaging is of course also done from airplanes.  Remote Sensing Research shows how aerial photography has been used to monitor prairie dog colonies, wetlands, and document natural disturbances. ON/Site Images has examples of remote video imaging. Current work in autonomous (robotic) flight seems likely to lower dramatically the skill level and therefore the cost required to acquire this data, and probably quite soon. A useful set of links to the work now underway can be found on Robert Michelson's Launch Point for Aerial Robotics.
 
It would be convenient to convert remote photographs into maps: to translate "realistic" photographic imagery into simpified icons overlain
with non-photographic information, like feature names or species distribution ranges or altitude contours. This process begins with what is called 'orthophotography' -- assigning geodesic coordinates to points in photographs.  The curious can be bought up to speed on the method
at the MIT Digital Orthophoto Browser .

Point Sensors

Cameras capture data from wide areas with a single exposure.  Many signals of interest to the Earth Mirror -- chemical presence,  atmospheric pressure, seismic activity -- are acquired by measuring a single point in time and space. Building images out of point sensing requires either really smart modeling software or huge arrays of sensors, all running in parallel.  Both simulation sofware and sensor arrays are in their infancy, but both are coming along.

These arrays are sometimes called mesonets.  Perhaps the best example of the genre is The Oklahoma Mesonet, which combines 111 automated stations, each sampling the air and soil on 17 different parameters in every county in Kansas.  This array allows the site to present dynamic maps and animations of changes across the state in temperature, wind, dewpoint, etc.   Inputs are recombined according to various formulas to make more complex data products, like a burning index, a drought index, an energy release component, and so on, all of which can be used to model the effects of fires or droughts.

A second slick illustration of the concept is The Real Time Environmental Information Network and Analysis System (REINAS),  set up to investigate the whole range of issues involved with acquiring realtime data from arrays of such instrument as marine radars, wind profilers, thermister chains, and meteorological stations.  Contains useful sections on interface design, including discussions on such central issues as the representation of uncertainty.  Eventually REINAS hopes to make software available that will allow analogues to be set up anywhere in the world.

Much of the data underlying El Nino studies is being gathered by the Tropical Observing Array..  The TAO is built of 70 deep ocean moored buoys spread over 16,000 km of ocean report oceanographic and meteorological data, including sea temperatures at 10 different levels down to 500 meters. Over 1997 the network will start measuring radiation, rainfall, and nutrient and marine chemical data.  The site is a library of all the data arriving or accumulated on this critical marine feature, including archived data, realtime feeds, and simulations or forecasts along many modalities, including temperature and the surface and subsurface behavior of the ocean.  Eventually such arrays will be exist in all the world's oceans.
 
Instrument arrays, in this case seismographs, are what make possible the observation of the Earth in the geological sense, which is clearly a central element of the Earth Mirror.  Two of the richer resource stations on the subject are "Seismosurfer" Susan Rosenberg's Quaking Home Page and The USGS's site on earthquakes.  The Survey's presentation of material on recent California and Nevada earthquakes is especially slick -- seismic events, including epicenters and magnitudes, are mapped and updated hourly (every five minutes after a real quake).  (Rosenberg's Earthwaves has a display of historical data for the same region that is both comprehensive and graphically imaginative.)   Finally the USGS's Geological Research Activities site offers a wealth of material, including animated models of pollutant transport, the dynamics of the fresh and salt bodies of water, and atmospheric modeling, all organized by region.  Check it out.

Building these huge arrays is probably too large a job for central governments and their agencies.  Like much  of the Earth Mirror,
they will probably be built by enthusiasts, volunteers, and students, working in large numbers over many years. The Virtual Forest Initiative  is an illustration:  a consortium of research and educational institutions placed a net of solar-powered instrument loggers in eight ecologies (lowland terrestrial, ridgetop terrestrial, deep pond aquatic, stream aquatic, and so on) in New York's Black Rock Forest.  The instruments take readings at five minute intervals of water, air, and soil temperatures, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, solar radiation, wind speed and direction, humidity, and precipitation. Columbia's Earth Curriculum Project shows one way this information can be incorporated into a curriculum.

Another example are the "public seismic networks" connecting homebuilt, or kit-built, seismographs.  The Princeton Earth Physics Project is building one such network in high schools across the US. Enthusiasts either out of high school or whose schools are not participating might look in at the Public Seismic Networks site, which among other resources stores the homebuilt seismograph FAQ.  Given a dense enough array of such instruments (or incredibly smart simulation software) The Earth Mirror would be able to show patterns of vibration spreading through the crust in realtime, like ripples expanding over the surface of a lake (except in 3-D).  Japan's interesting Breathing Earth Project moves in that direction: it uses software to generate dynamic visualizations of all the earthquakes that have happened worldwide over the past two weeks.  (Requires Shockwave.)

Not all of these sites require expensive instruments.  The data needs of
the growing network of Breeding Bird Atlas sites are met by volunteers.  Examples of regional sites include Illinois, LA County, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, and Washington.  The Kentucky Fish and Wildlife Agency site looks a model of a partnership between volunteer field workers and salaried data designers.  Views of data collected up through 1996
can be found on the National North American Breeding Bird Survey
site.  Cornell's BirdSource hosts several of these projects on the national level, including the Winter Finch Survey,  Project Feeder Watch, the Classroom Bird Watch, and the largest wildlife survey in the world, the Christmas Bird Count.
 

Simulators

Simulation models help us evaluate the consequences of given actions or inactions and to make plausible guesses as to what is happening between our always-too-sparse sensor points. Checking a simulation output against a real-time sensor feed can alert us to changes 'contrary to expectation', which of course can be quite important.

Simulations are a relatively underdeveloped feature of the Earth Mirror,
with the single but overwhelming exception of the weather, which of course uses them to do forecasting.  The US Navy's Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center is responsible for preparing accurate representations of the temperature structure of the ocean.  Models are used to interpolate values in areas not covered by sensors, which is of course almost everywhere. The pictures are gorgeous. They also make compellingly obvious what a low-entropy environment the ocean is. There is a lot of energy out there.  The Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies in Maryland has some nice representations of sea surface temperate models coupled to global change models.  Good animations can be found at NOAA's Thermal Modeling and Analysis Project.

One approach for tracking the development of the field is to see how companies selling environmental modeling software demo their products. Kencon is a good case in point. Note the large number of databases -- regulatory, chemical, geomechanical -- needed to make models useful.
Finally, less ambitious but worth bookmarking are NOAA's Tide Predictor and the Navy's lunar/Sunrise/Sunset calculator.  Curious about the current phase of the moon?  Here's where you go.
 

Presenting and Representing 

For all their diversity all the sites mentioned have to decide what kind of questions they will recognize and how they will present the answers.   Such "interface design" issues are rarely simple, even for sites that do nothing but find the distance between specified points.  For the Earth Mirror as a whole the problem is overwhelming.  A person interacting with the Earth Mirror should be able to ask questions like ...

    -- What is the relation between changes in cloud cover and
            air temperature over Europe during the past year?
    -- How have hunting ranges of the wolf packs in Yellowstone
            waxed and waned over the last ten years?
    -- Show me the distribution of  surface minerals in Australia,
            color-coded by age.
    -- What was the normal (average) ocean circulation pattern
            of ocean currents over the last ten years?  Which year
            showed the largest deviation from 'normal'? .

... and be able to understand the answers regardless of  culture, interest specialization, or level of education.

No extant interface is remotely this powerful.  Perhaps of all the challenges surveyed this is the hardest.  Still, as in all other aspects of the Mirror, many sites are beavering away at the problem.
 
The Massachusetts Electronic Atlas is a pioneering experiment in roll-your-own mapping. In theory it lets users point-and-click from a list of  attributes (Boundaries, Communication, Construction/Development, Crime, Economy, Education, Employment, Environmental Regulation Health, Income, Index, Industry, Municipal Revenues, Physical Characteristics, Population, Race/Ethnicity, Real Estate/Lodging, Transportation, and Voting) and then compile those attributes into a map of the state.

Environmental System Research Institute is one of the leading companies
making GIS tools -- data formats, servers, clients, and the like. Their
site is packed with demos illustrating various applications, from searching the EPA's Toxic Release Inventory by zipcode to building thematic maps of the states on the fly. The site also contains a spiffy Java Interface to the CIA's WorldBook and several other demos.

Representing the weather requires  its own specialized series of data types: radar, infrared, enhanced infrared (color), water vapor, various surface data, and so on. Daniel Edward Vietor remarkable weather visualizer handles all these faultlessly. The weather site to go to if you can only go to one.  IRI/LDEO Climate Data Library contains a wide variety of earth
science data, primarily oceanographic and atmospheric datasets.
Step-by-step examples.  The Kanview WWW Project ("providing cartographic representations of Kansas' people, culture and environment") slices up Kansas every which way.  The MIT Digital Orthophoto Browser site, already mentioned above, has clearly worked hard on this problem.

The mapping resources on the web are gathered at Matt Rosenberg's  Maps and Geography of the World..  Those looking for good cheap mapping software mightwant to check out  Allison Software's MAPIT .
 

Putting It All Together -- El Nino

You can pick up a hint of how imaging, point sensing, simulations, and archives might combine by looking at the sites that already present features of the Earth in great detail and imagining that level of presentation extended over the entire earth.  No feature illustrates this promise as dramatically as El Niño. NOAA's El Niño Home page, Theme Page, and Main Pages are deep, comprehensive sites organized around the basic questions that come up with regard to this feature (How Big is it?  How will it affect the world?) Tons of graphics.  Also note the El Nino Hotline of Doom.
 

The Earth Mirror in Education

One way of using The Earth Mirror for science or environmental education is by using the resources of the Mirror as curriculum objects, as though it were a huge research library.  A second is to set up what are called
"nucleation sites" -- in which the student finds material on the web on topics of interest, organizes them into html pages, and then
publishes those pages, perhaps on the school server, as a guide for others.  (In theory teachers could grade these efforts by how many hits the pages got, but alas this method is vulnerable to phony file calls.)  Still a third is for the students to gather original data and then publish that over the web.

This latter approach can work in two ways: though organizing student-scientist relationships, in which students collect data of interest to professionals, with professionals giving feedback in return.  (For a quick overview of examples see the Student-Scientist Projects page maintained by TERC.)   Another direction is to publish data of interest to other students in other schools.

These themes are emerging on a number of sites. Perhaps the single most impressive example (4000 schools; 55 countries; pages in three languages)  is NOAA's flourishing GLOBE program (Global Learning and Observation to Benefit the Environment). Other examples include the University of Michigan's "One Sky, Many Voices" project, with units in weather and atmospheric quality, the Concord Consortium's project on air haze, Stevens Institute's Global Sun/Temperature Project, Boiling Point Project, Water Use Project, and Global Water Sampling Project, in which students map measurements of temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, CO2, phosphates, nitrates, turbidity, coliform bacteria, and invertebrate identification. Cornell's Classroom Feeder Watch Project also is a nice illustration of the sam idea -- which, to repeat, is pooling local data over wide areas.  See also YouthCaN (Youth Communicating and Networking), an annual conference on using telecommunications to develop enviromentally-focussed cooperative projects among students and teachers around the world.

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