Kim Gaskill explores Google Earth's updated 3D graphics by zooming into neighborhood pools, then uses the app's random location feature and lands on Los Glaciares National Park to see the Perito Moreno glacier.
It's a new day. I'm Kim Gaskill and this is the Daily Spark. I'm sitting here looking at pools in both of the yards next to us here, and of course they're covered because you have to close your pool down for the season here in New Jersey. It'll be time to start thinking about opening them again. There's actually some work going on next door on their pool today with some landscaping. But I got to thinking, how many people around here have pools? So of course, because I wanted to find that out, I opened up my Google Earth, which I can get an aerial view of the area, and you can actually see the dotted swimming pools in the back of yards across the landscape. And I'll do that once in a while when I'm traveling. I'll open up Google Earth and, and kind of see an aerial view of the area that I'm in and see if there's anything interesting that I don't know about and isn't on a Facebook event or anything and, and see if there's a geographic area that looks cool and I want to just go explore. So today I was looking up the— gonna look the pools up, and I noticed there are some changes in Google Earth. For one, the graphics are like— they definitely upped their game on the graphics. Pretty awesome. It kind of started going into the different mountain areas and, and showing some peaks and stuff, and did a 3D aerial view of a couple of different areas and the new features. And one of the things that you can do on Google Earth is you can roll the little dice up top. If you'd install the app on your phone, there's a little die on, on the top row of icons, and if you click that, it will pick a random roll of the dice location for you to go explore. So when I did that today, because of course I'm a squirrel distracted kind of mindset today, it took me to Los Glaciares National Park in the southern tip of Argentina near the Chilean border. And you probably have seen this glacier before, and if you Think about it. Did you even think there were glaciers in South America heading close down to the equator? Well, there are, and it's the Austral Andes range that's down there in the mountains. So they're pretty stinking high, and there are some glaciers down there. You've probably seen the glacial wall fall in videos. And break off and calve into the, into the water. And that's probably Perito Moreno. That's one of the best known dramatic icefall locations from that front wall there that falls into Lake Argentino. But I thought it was pretty cool, the little dice feature to just give me this location. Now of course it's cold this morning, so I would have preferred sunny Caribbean beach, but this was pretty awesome. It is a fantastic majestic view, a 3D view through the mountains and across the glacier. So if you get a chance today, check out the new Google Earth and play around, and join me again tomorrow for another Daily Spark.
