Visualizing the Structure of the Earth’s Lithosphere on the Google Earth Virtual-Globe Platform

ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information

Liangfeng Zhu¹  Wensheng Kan¹  Yu Zhang¹  Jianzhong Sun¹ 

[1] Key Laboratory of GIS, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China;

关键词: virtual globe;    lithospheric model;    KML;    3D visualization;    Google Earth;   

DOI  :  10.3390/ijgi5030026

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

While many of the current methods for representing the existing global lithospheric models are suitable for academic investigators to conduct professional geological and geophysical research, they are not suited to visualize and disseminate the lithospheric information to non-geological users (such as atmospheric scientists, educators, policy-makers, and even the general public) as they rely on dedicated computer programs or systems to read and work with the models. This shortcoming has become more obvious as more and more people from both academic and non-academic institutions struggle to understand the structure and composition of the Earth’s lithosphere. Google Earth and the concomitant Keyhole Markup Language (KML) provide a universal and user-friendly platform to represent, disseminate, and visualize the existing lithospheric models. We present a systematic framework to visualize and disseminate the structure of the Earth’s lithosphere on Google Earth. A KML generator is developed to convert lithospheric information derived from the global lithospheric model LITHO1.0 into KML-formatted models, and a web application is deployed to disseminate and visualize those models on the Internet. The presented framework and associated implementations can be easily exported for application to support interactively integrating and visualizing the internal structure of the Earth with a global perspective.

【 授权许可】

Unknown