USING GOOGLE EARTH'S ADVANCED FEATURES TO VISUALIZE THE HAWAIIAN ARCHIPELAGO

A Google Earth™ tour was created to display volcanism, seismicity, and erosion in the Hawaiian island chain. Basic and advanced techniques were used for different visual effects. The basic techniques include creation of place marks with icons and descriptive text. Using HTML, images were added to the place mark descriptions and hyperlinks were made to web sources. Image overlays were draped on the landscape to illustrate aspects of the geology. With a series of these place marks and overlays, a tour was created to permit end-users to view sites in a pre-defined sequence. Advanced techniques augment the basic tour. Some place marks were set to be invisible in order to control the viewer's flight path over the Google Earth terrain. Other advanced methods involved writing Keyhole Markup Language (KML) to create fade effects and control level of detail (LOD). Timespan tags were used to generate four-dimensional sequences and screen overlays were added for map legends and general information. Finally, Google SketchUp™ software was used to add solid models of earthquake focal mechanisms. Future work will include the recording of a podcast to run in parallel with the visual tour.