The bones of the earth; a new perspective

[fivemack]

The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission is one of the esoteric topics I'm most prone to enthuse about; I think of it as the last major donation made by the military-industrial complex to the sum of human knowledge before 9/11, and so possibly the last for some time. Using a fortnight of time on the Space Shuttle, Earth was mapped to 90-metre resolution in position and about one-metre in height.

This is a very interesting resolution; water erosion is the main visible feature, you can see some of the moderate-scale processes of geology (are the long linear features dykes?), and you can't see humanity at all.

ESDI is the best interface to the data I've found so far, though it dispenses data in TIFF-format files, one square degree per file and one 32-bit float per pixel; these aren't viewable in standard software.

If you pull out hexdump, gcc, python and gimp in some order, however, you can get something like



I'll be very impressed if anyone knows the shape of my country well enough to be sure of where that is.

I've got a full-scale version (5MB .PNG) or a version with labels (5.5MB .PNG); I'd recommend downloading these to anyone with the connectivity. The labels come, I think, from a full dump of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency's GNIS database; coordinates there are rounded to the arc-minute, which is about a mile, so I've positioned them randomly within a two-arc-minute square aroud the given position. This may mean North Wallop is positioned south of South Wallop; sorry.

If anyone's aware of a better freely-available gazetteer, please tell me.

Comments

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I initially wondered about the Southampton area but skew, but then decided it was the Severn estuary. Something about the angle of it. You'll have to trust me when I say that I only looked at the labelled version after that.

Oh, and I have managed to line up two browser tabs onto the same image such that I can turn the labels on and off just by switching between tabs. Which amuses me after a couple of glasses of wine.

[jojomojo.livejournal.com]

You can probably feed the data to the Demeter engine ( http://www.terrainengine.com ) and view it in 3d, too :)

[kaet.livejournal.com]

Is it the Bristol area?

[tombee.livejournal.com]

Curses, beaten to it.. Bleedin' obvious, really, but extremely cool all the same.

Perhaps of more interest are the strangely regular and non-fractal series of squashed spheres towards the top left of the image. Part of the South Wales Large Hadron Collider, perhaps?