Bailey: Okay, so next up
is Declan De Paor.
Declan grew up in Ireland
but at some point
his career moved
to the east coast of the U.S.
and has taught
in a number of schools
throughout Massachusetts
and the East Coast.
He's currently
a research professor
at, um, Old Dominion University.
He's interested in the area
of geophysics.
In particular, he wants
to be able
to visualize stuff
on the ground,
which means Google Earth
isn't an overly useful tool
for him in some ways.
However rather than complaining
about this fact,
he's actually gone out
and done something about it.
So using Google Earth
in combination with SketchUp,
he's found weird
and wonderful ways
to bring those visualizations
above the ground
and into the user's
viewpoint.
And he's gonna be talking
on this
and some related themes,
um, today.
De Paor: Thanks very much,
John.
I'd like to start
by acknowledging support
from the NSF, CCLI,
and DAR programs,
who are helping me to develop
these teaching tools.
Last year at this conference,
I showed people what I thought
of at the time
was a hack of a way
of looking at the subsurface
because geologists
and geophysicists like me
want to see what's under
the Google Earth.
And so I developed a technique
of basically lifting up
lots of the Earth's crust
to look at what's underneath.
And then the more I used this
with students,
the more I realized
that it's actually
a very useful pedagogical tool.
Even if we could fly
under the Google Earth surface,
it would still be good
for students
to lift blocks up because
that enables them
to see the data as coming
from below.
They've lifted the data up
out of the ground themselves.
That tactile element
is pedagogically beneficial.
So the title of my talk
this year
"How would you move
Mount Fuji?",
according to the author
of this book
by William Poundstone anyway,
is typical of the kind
of question
that you might've been asked
at an interview
in Microsoft maybe
a decade ago.
Bill Gates apparently liked
asking people
impossible--what he called
"the impossible question."
Maybe that's so as
to choose people
to develop software
that's impossible to use.
That's my own personal bias.
But anyway, I thought about
this question
and thought a more important
question
really is if you could move
Mount Fuji,
why on Earth
would you want to?
And isn't Mount Fuji quite happy
sitting there
where it evolved in Japan?
But as a geologist,
the answer is immediately
evident.
And one initial answer
to that question would be
to look inside the mountain,
see what the interior
of the mountain looks like.
So if we want to look inside
Mount Fuji,
one idea would be to lift it up
and to look underneath.
And I've been developing
this technique
to lift blocks out
of the ground using SketchUp.
So this is a USGS map
of the Washington State region.
If we lift up a SketchUp block
out of the ground,
we see USGS data models
anywhere on the side
of this block
showing how the Juan de Fuca
plate
part of the Pacific Ocean crust,
is dipping down underneath
the continental crust
of Washington State
and letting off volatiles
that then cause the magma ascent
to create mountains
like Mount Rainier
and Mount Hood and so on.
And this block is just one
of a whole set
that I've developed.
And I've put my web address
in the bottom left here.
You can go to that link
and see dozens of similar blocks
for different plate tectonic
scenarios
around--around the globe.
You'll notice the time slider
at the top.
of the, uh, image here.
I'm using that time slider
to adjust
the altitude tag
of the SketchUp model here.
So when you move
the time slider,
you're basically changing
the altitude tag in KML.
And that's what causes the block
to move up and down.
So let's look at making
a block like this in SketchUp.
We start getting rid
of the guy there
and pull out a rectangle.
Extrude that
into a rectangular block.
And you notice that
I extrude downwards
in the negative Z direction
because I want my block
to start under the ground.
And then I select a couple
of images.
Here I'm putting a map
on the surface,
but you could actually grab
a bit
of the Google Earth surface
itself
and plant it on the top
of the block
if you wanted to look like part
of the Google Earth surface.
Here I'm taking the USGS
cross section,
dragging it across
as a texture
across the side of the block
in SketchUp.
And then we can manipulate
that texture.
Expand it, scale it,
rotate it.
Make it fit the block
to suit our own needs.
I've more work to do
on this one here,
but you get the idea.
So then we save that
as a KMZ file.
And as I said,
then go into the KML
and put a time stamp
in the place mark
that controls the block.
That's the basic idea
for a block.
And as I've said,
I've made lots of these.
But you notice they have
a flatter, smooth surface.
Now that's okay for the scale
that we're looking at here.
Say if we were looking
at Mount Fuji from space
from the space shuttle,
and we're sufficiently far away
that it's only really
the large scale plate tectonics
we're seeing here.
Things like mountains
aren't represented here
by more than the thickness
of a line by a pixel
or maybe two pixels.
And so it doesn't really matter
that the top of the surface
of the block is flat.
The Earth is pretty flat
on this scale.
But if we were to go closer up,
and there's a view--
an oblique view of Mount Fuji
from, let's say, helicopter
elevation--
At this scale,
a flat-topped block
would be senseless.
It certainly would be useless
for a geologist
to convey the
three-dimensionality
of the mountain.
So how do we actually put
topography
on the top of our block?
So let's start by capturing
some terrain in SketchUp.
The trick here is to get
real close.
You have to be at an elevation
of five kilometers or less.
Which means you might have
to patch together
a few little bits.
You can then import
that terrain into SketchUp.
There it is.
Bump it into a three-dimensional
terrain
using the SketchUp tool.
And now we select it and--
select all.
And explode the hidden geometry
of the block
so we get down to the polygons
that define this topography.
Now we could actually manipulate
each polygon one by one.
We could create erosion
by moving polygons down
or lava flow by moving them up.
Or we could change
the location of this block,
either in altitude
or in latitude or longitude.
So here I've taken
a slice out of Mount Fuji.
Put a very simple
student-style cartoon
of the interior of the mountain.
And you see the time slider
I've just set
to loop forwards and backwards,
so that actually lifts
the altitude
of the block up and down.
And meanwhile a student
can rotate it around
and look at it
from all sorts of directions.
Can even fly inside the mountain
if they want to have
a look inside.
And part of the project
I'm working on
with colleague Steve Whitmeyer
at JMU
is to find out whether this kind
of cartoon cross section
is actually beneficial
to learning versus
real data like geoseismic
sections.
Cartoons are simpler
for students,
but they're clearly not real.
And maybe the real data
might be more meaningful
to students.
Well that's the moving
of the mountain
in the vertical direction.
What about the lateral
direction?
Why would we want to do that?
Why would we want to move
Mount Fuji
to a different location?
Well, the reason we would
goes back to something that
Charles Lyell, one of
the forefathers of geology,
said in the 19th century.
He said the present
is the key to the past.
If we want to understand
the past geology of our planet,
we need to look
at what's happening
on the Earth's surface
at present
and use that as an analog.
So here in this movie
I'm about to run--
this is I've just taken
just little chunks
of the continents, put them back
to where they were
1/2 billion years ago.
You see Africa and South America
stuck together,
Gondwana, in the bottom left.
And North America in the top
center of the image.
They're about to hit
into each other
to make a supercontinent
we call Rodinia.
And then they'll split apart
again
and come together
in a different orientation
to make Pangaea which
is the supercontinent
most people know about.
So we're going way back
before Pangaea here.
So let's--let's roll it.
And I've marked
western Massachusetts
in the North American block.
So here they smash
into each other,
drift apart, create
the proto-Atlantic Ocean.
And now you see a Japan-style
arc drifting across
that ocean and smashing
into North America.
That's eastern Massachusetts,
which came along and hit into
western Massachusetts,
to create the, uh,
the state I used to live in
up til last year.
And--and so here's
an ideal opportunity for us.
We have just down the road
from where I lived
in Massachusetts,
we have these, uh,
frost-shattered lavas.
They're called hyaloclastite,
but you don't need to know that.
There are also pillow lavas.
This are indicative
that lava flowed--
bubbled into the ocean
and the frost-shattered lava
shows that there was ice
around.
That lava erupted under
an ice cap.
So we have Paleozoic volcanics
in an arc
in eastern Massachusetts
today.
And the rocks indicate that
they were very like Mount Fuji
when they were formed.
So we can now take Mount Fuji
and represent these rocks
using it as a model.
Now lots of people have put
paleo-geographic maps
and draped them
onto the Google Earth surface.
Particularly Ron Blakey's maps
have been used,
and Valerie Runisov
has animated them.
And that's fine
in two dimensions,
but if you actually make
this map semi-transparent,
you look at the terrain
underneath,
it's the new terrain,
the current elevations
that are under that map,
Where it says island arc there,
if you pop this
into three dimensions,
you won't get the mountains
and the sea in the same place.
So in addition
to our paleo-geography,
we need a paleo-terrain.
And so that's what
I'm trying to do.
I'm trying to take some,
like, Mount Fuji
and replicate it in order
to create a paleo-terrain.
I'm particularly interested
with my colleague
Steve Whitmeyer
in the upper right end
of this Japan-like arc
because it outcrops
in my home country of Ireland
in western Ireland.
And there we see Paleozoic
volcanics
in the image
on the top right here
in a place called
Knock Kilbride.
And those rocked formed
in an island arc environment.
So let's take Mount Fuji
and put it there.
And because volcanoes grow
in a similar fashion,
it's a simple matter
to simulate volcanic growth
by simply moving the volcano
up out of the ground
by changing its elevation.
So here I'm taking a volcano.
Actually this one isn't Fuji.
This is Sitkin Island
from the Aleutians,
but it'll do.
And it's simulating
what those Paleozoic rocks
in western Ireland look like
at the time that they were
formed.
Now in addition
to taking something
like Mount Fuji,
sometimes we don't want
that very recognizable Fuji,
um, snow cap there.
For example, we might want
the area
to look more vegetated
or less.
And so we can use the match
photo tool in SketchUp
to drape any kind
of image we wish
over the Fuji terrain model.
And so here I've taken
an image of Hawaii
and draped it over the terrain
to create a Fuji DM
that would be suitable,
for example, to represent
an island in the Cretaceous
when it would be unlikely
to have a snow cap on it.
If we were looking
at a lower Paleozoic volcano,
we wouldn't want
all of that vegetation
because it was pre--
pre-forest and grasses.
And so we might take
a volcano
from the Alto Plano of Chile,
for example, and drape it.
We could also take our own
geological maps.
I've put on the right here,
a geological map that
I've just sketched myself
and draped it over
the terrain.
Watch the volcanic structure
grow.
And with the Google Earth
plug-in,
we can now control
these models with JavaScript,
so I'm rotating Mount Fuji
around
three independent axes here.
You might say, "Why on Earth
would you want to do that?"
But again, geologists realize
that parts of the Earth's crust
get stretched
and squashed and smashed
and broken up.
And so we want to do
all sorts of things
to--to bits of the Earth's
crust.
And so I'm very excited
about the possibilities
of working with
JavaScript-controlled models
on Google Earth
and using the plug-in.
Okay, here I'm taking a map
of the northwest part of Ireland
here
and restoring fault
displacements
so that the slices of crust
that Ireland's made up of
go back to where they were
in the Paleozoic.
And you know, 1/4 to 1/2 billion
years ago.
And now we can do
one extra thing here
and that is we can link
those paleo-places
that has existed
on the Earth's surface
say 400 million years ago
using what I call
a back to the future
place mark.
We can take those places
and link them
to the present-day evidence
for that tectonic model.
So in the pop-up image here,
you see the pillow lavas,
these volcanic rocks
that flowed underwater,
and that we use as evidence
to suggest
that this place used to be
an arc.
So if you like the present DEM
is key to the past DEM.
And we can use samples
of the present terrain,
move them around to effectively
represent past landscapes.
The ultimate goal beyond
today's Google Earth
is to represent the landscape
at every place on Earth
and every moment in the past.
So for example, we can see
Iceland on today's Google Earth.
We'd like to see it
3 million years ago,
7 million years ago,
15 million years ago.
And be able to go there,
fly around,
helicopter around it
just as we can with today's--
with today's landscape.
Okay, so if you answered
the question,
"How would you move Mount Fuji?"
by saying
"With Google Earth
and a Macintosh sort of PC
and certainly with SketchUp,"
you might not get yourself
a job in Microsoft.
But on the other hand,
you might get yourself a job
as a research scientist
in Old Dominion working with me
and trying to change
Google Earth.
Thanks very much.
[applause]
