Google Earth Scavenger Hunt

A Google Earth Scavenger Hunt THIS ACTIVITY IS DESIGNED FOR GOOGLE EARTH VERSION 4.0 OR HIGHER; SOME FUNCTIONS MAY NOT WORK IN EARLIER VERSIONS.

1. Find your house and the School of Education in Google Earth. 2. In Google Earth, use the ruler/path tool to draw the route of your bus or car to the School of Education. Determine the distance in miles. Distance ________________________ 3. What is meant by the term “as the crow flies?”

4. In Google Earth, draw the route from your house to school “as the crow flies” using ruler/line. Determine the distance in miles. Distance ________________________ 5. What is the mathematical difference between the two distances. Difference _______________________ 6. Closely look at the Missoula or your hometown image in Google Earth. Determine these aspects of the image. Season the image was taken _______________________ Year the image was taken _________________________ 7. Excluding Wikipedia links, what is the closest Geographic Web or Featured Content link to your house? (Make sure these layers are turned on) Link _______________________________________ 8. Using Google Earth, determine the Perimeter of the Mall of America in Bloomington (Minneapolis) and your town’s closest mall in meters. Your mall _________________ Mall of America ________________

Tim Mosbacher and Rachel Loehman, PhD. SpatialSci, University of Montana, 2007.

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9. Use the Fly To box to navigate to the city of New Orleans, Louisiana. Do you think the images you see were captured before or after Hurricane Katrina? Why or why not?

10. Use the Fly To box to navigate to each of the coordinate locations listed in the table below. Use the Zoom slider to fly to the specified Eye Altitude (eye altitude is your birds-eye distance above the earth’s surface). What features do you find at those locations? Where in the world is each feature? Hint: Enter the coordinates in the Fly To box as Latitude, Longitude. Example: 47.909614, -114.107208. Turn on layers to help you identify where you are.

Latitude (DD) 47.909614 35.366667 53.255226 36.937256 46.872946 48.860728

Longitude (DD) -114.107208 138.733333 -113.959616 -111.483938 -113.968433 2.336079

Altitude 12 miles 51500 feet 64 feet 5700 feet 850 feet 143 feet

What in the World?

11. Now let’s add new data layers to Google Earth by using the Google search engine to find KML or KMZ files. Choose a topic of interest, for example glaciers, and type in “glaciers kml” or “kmz” into the search cell. You may choose any topic but make sure you add kml or kmz after the topic. Your search should generate several results for the topic of choice. Click on the links until you find a site that has a kml or kmz file you can click on. Once you have found a kml or kmz file, click on it. A box should appear asking you to open or save, click open and the file should appear in Google Earth in the Places panel. In the space below, give the name of the layer, what information is being displayed, and describe how you might use it in your classroom.

Tim Mosbacher and Rachel Loehman, PhD. SpatialSci, University of Montana, 2007.

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