Explore The Planet With The New And Improved Google Earth

If you haven’t looked at Google Earth recently, now would be a good time for a return visit. Google just released a new version and it’s amazing.

It’s also an almost irresistible time sink. We live on a rich and varied planet and Google Earth is doing everything it can to make the earth’s visual wonders available to all. It’s very easy to lose time exploring Google Earth; you’ve been forewarned.

The first new feature you'll find when you check out the menu on the left side of the screen is Voyager, a collection of interactive guided tours. The Voyages are organized under the headings Travel, Nature, Culture, History and Editor’s Picks. Each one takes you to

different places and tells you about what's going on there using slideshows, videos and brief text panels Google calls Knowledge Cards. You can go to Gombe National Park in Tanzania and hear from Jane Goodall about her work with chimpanzees, tour natural habitats with the BBC or visit locations that figure in the life and works of Charles Dickens or Ernest Hemingway.

There are more than 50 Voyages to choose from with Google promising more in the future.

Google Earth now includes the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. There are over 20,000 lucky landing places with Knowledge Cards, collections of pictures and links to related places.

All of this could feel like looking at an immense picture book with video links if it weren’t for the 3D button. Every place I’ve visited by luck or on a Voyage has been rendered in 3D that you can fly through as you wish. The controls are as wonky as they are in Google Maps and the quality of the 3D is not always good, but when the 3D rendering is done well, the views can be spectacular. If you find a view you particularly like, you can save it as a postcard and send it to someone else.

A little more than 48 years ago, few people had seen a picture of the earth taken from space. Bill Anders, an astronaut on the Apollo 8 mission, took the picture (shown at the top of this article) called Earth-rise which went viral - or what passed for viral - in 1968. Now you can launch Google Earth, see the planet from space, zoom in to any location you please and fly around it in 3D. Amazing.

Forty-eight years may sound like a lot if you were born during this century, but it really isn’t very long. To gain some perspective, it took about 5,300 years to get from the first wheeled vehicles to the bicycle. How does Google do it? You can find out in the above video by Nat and Friends.

The new Google Earth is up and running on Chrome for the web and rolling out on Android this week. Versions for iOS and other browsers are planned.