NASA's Earth in 8 chunks, 5400x5400

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Ryder P. Moses
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Post by Ryder P. Moses »

Eh; still can't make out my house from it.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

2 km per pixel; it would look pretty faint ;-)

I was horrified looking at the b2 chunk... I visited the Iguazu Falls, as a kid; it was terrifyingly thick rainforest; gargantuous insects; you'd think you'd gone back 100 million years in time, being there. All that rainforest is gone now...

Image
Ryder P. Moses
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Post by Ryder P. Moses »

Ah, good ol' South America.

Personally I'd like to find an older copy of one of these earthmaps, from the early days of spaceflight, say, and compare how far the Sahel has grown.
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Post by klauss »

I was recently there, and I tell you, it's murder what they're doing.
It's "Tala Rasa" - I'm not sure what's the translation, but it means simply cutting all trees from a place, leaving only the roots (which will die eventually). It takes years - decades - for those places to recover from such a thing. I really don't understand those guys who do it... and I think it should be banned.

I was biking, and admiring one beautiful landscape after another, until one of those places came into view. Depressing.
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Ryder P. Moses
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Post by Ryder P. Moses »

Decades? Naw. 'Cos the topsoil erodes off in the first rain, and the livestock finish what's left. Is why they have to keep expanding- nothing will grow in their wake.
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Post by Zeog »

Ryder is right! Take Spain or Italy. There had been big forrests all accross europe until first the romans and later the kings decided that having a big fleet is a good idea. They have kept cutting down trees until there were all gone. Look at the pictures! Spain and Italy had been green once! The topsoil is gone and erosion prevents it from coming back. Every year now there are mudflows burrying villages around the mediterrainean sea.
The same thing will be there where the rain forrest was. There is naked stone and totally infertile ground there now. You have to get some topsoil there before anything will grow again.
At least there is a great place to shoot movies playing on mars now.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

I was reading somewhere, for every human on Earth there are 4 tons of termites. Most of them feeding on the tree stumps we leave after clear-cutting. And apparently termites contribute more methane to the atmo than all our cows together give a fart...
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Post by Zeog »

The cows aren't the problem. It's huge areas being flooded and used as rice fields. Bacterias in the mud produce an enormous amount of methane and have been for the last couple of thousand years. During the last 5000 years or so they had vent enough methane into the atmosphere to prevent the upcoming ice age. This has been shown by ice boring experiments where they extracted tiny air bubbles from the past athmosphere. These bubbles show a dramatic increase when humans started to care about agriculture. And then there was/is industrialization...
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Yeah, I know, I think you're talking about the article on Scientific American, 2 or 3 months ago. I read it too. But at the end of the last 5000 years, the line spikes up. But I agree the cows (and termites) are not the biggest problem. CO2 is a bigger problem than methane. What we've been doing in the industrial era is qualitatively different, though. There are two natural carbon cycles: One is biological; the other geological. The geological cycle is much slower but contains more carbon than the biological, and here's the problem: Oil extraction essentially takes carbon out of the geological loop, and injects it into the biological loop. Sure we can grow trees back and dump iron in the oceans, if somehow we happen to smarten up; BUT, what we cannot undo is the fact that the total carbon (atmosphere+biota) will remain above normal, no matter; and understanding the long term consequences of that is the megabuck question...
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Post by Zeog »

Well, one could argue that the carbon of the now extracted oil or coal was once in the biological cycle. If we have too much CO2 now, where does it actually come from? Volcanoes? Haven't volcanoes been injecting CO2 from the geological cycle to the biological one since the dawn of earth? Maybe we're just too fast compared to the natural cycles. It probably takes some time before the pendula starts swinging back...

I think I read the article you mentioned in a local version of scientific american.
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Post by klauss »

Chuck (or whoever)... I would *really* love if you could find a heightmap version of that (normalmap+height would be a dream... but I doubt you'd find one).
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Post by Zeog »

I don't have a ready to texture version of it, but you can find the elevation data/pictures here for free: http://seamless.usgs.gov/
Maybe you can make a normal map by youself then.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Klauss, I'm downloading 32K by 16k specular and normal maps, right now; also a bump-map, but it's only 8k by 4k.
You want me to scale them, then break them up, to same rez as the textures in the first post (5400x5400)? Or the other way around, like scale the originals there to 4k by 4k?
Here's the link, btw,
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catal ... mpspec.php
They have DDS format textures too.
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Post by klauss »

I can take care of scaling and other stuff - I just couldn't find them, and I did spend a lot of time searching. Guess you have to know where to look for them ;)

Ok, so... if you link the highest-res versions available for diffuse/normal/height/citylights (if happen to find those), I'd have fun with them :D

:oops: NM - saw the link.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

LOL; I just entered "blue marble bump map nasa" and it was the first link on the results page. Less than 15 seconds.
From now on, I'll be your Google interface :)
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Post by DualJoe »

Some links that turned up on Blendernation about planets and textures.

http://www.oera.net/How2/TextureMaps.htm
http://planetpixelemporium.com/planets.html
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