ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2016, 5(3), 26; doi:10.3390/ijgi5030026
Visualizing the Structure of the Earth’s Lithosphere on the Google Earth Virtual-Globe Platform
1
Key Laboratory of GIS, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China
2
School of Geography Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China
3
Shanghai Key Lab for Urban Ecology, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editor: Wolfgang Kainz
Received: 15 January 2016 / Revised: 10 February 2016 / Accepted: 29 February 2016 / Published: 2 March 2016
Abstract
While many of the current methods for representing the existing global lithospheric models are suitable for academic investigators to conduct professional geological and geophysical research, they are not suited to visualize and disseminate the lithospheric information to non-geological users (such as atmospheric scientists, educators, policy-makers, and even the general public) as they rely on dedicated computer programs or systems to read and work with the models. This shortcoming has become more obvious as more and more people from both academic and non-academic institutions struggle to understand the structure and composition of the Earth’s lithosphere. Google Earth and the concomitant Keyhole Markup Language (KML) provide a universal and user-friendly platform to represent, disseminate, and visualize the existing lithospheric models. We present a systematic framework to visualize and disseminate the structure of the Earth’s lithosphere on Google Earth. A KML generator is developed to convert lithospheric information derived from the global lithospheric model LITHO1.0 into KML-formatted models, and a web application is deployed to disseminate and visualize those models on the Internet. The presented framework and associated implementations can be easily exported for application to support interactively integrating and visualizing the internal structure of the Earth with a global perspective. View Full-TextKeywords:
virtual globe; lithospheric model; KML; 3D visualization; Google Earth
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Zhu, L.; Kan, W.; Zhang, Y.; Sun, J. Visualizing the Structure of the Earth’s Lithosphere on the Google Earth Virtual-Globe Platform. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2016, 5, 26.
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ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf.
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