viz.

(Image Credit: Google Earth image of ash cloud in Iceland , produced with GeoEye satellite imagery)

My very dear friend Tes is stuck in Ireland this week, grounded by the great Iceland ash cloud and hoping to get back in time for her dissertation defense.  She’s been looking for a t-shirt that says, “Eyjafjallajokull 2010” for days, but evidently, no one’s selling.

Her steady stream of emails from Ireland made me think to go look for Google Earth volcanic imagery, and indeed, there are new satellite images from “GeoEye Featured Imagery” (Under “Layers,” click on “More,” then  “GeoEye.”)  The above picture allows us to see smoke coming out of a bright spot near the mid-left of the image and great clouds of ash floating down toward the bottom-right corner.

This search made me wonder if imagery had been updated—or high-res imagery had ever been produced—of Upper Big Branch Mine, the site of the massive West Virginia mining disaster that took 29 lives last week.

What I found was interesting.  Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, WV can be seen, in its current state, in this photo.

(Image Credit: Google Earth image Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, WV)

It’s a mountaintop mine, so what you see is a mountain with its top cut away.  If you have your “Global Awareness” layer turned on (as I do in the above picture), you’ll see a yellow box drawn around the mining site.  These boxes appear around mountaintop mining sites throughout West Virginia and are maintained by Appalachian Mountaintop Removal, a group that has built an electronic “Memorial For the Mountains.”

You’ll see a blue square at the upper-left corner of the yellow box.  If you’re in Google Earth and you click on that square, you find historical imagery of the mining area.  The below image shows the same mountain in 1986.

(Image Credit: Google Earth historical image Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, WV)

The difference is startling, and the Appalachian Mountaintop Removal project's electronic memorial makes this information readily and publically available.  Each "Memorial" placemark links to the previous and next mountain on the tour, so you can click through them and learn about the history of West Virginia’s natural areas and the mining industry's activity.  The organization says that they will continue to archive imagery, with the goal of providing three decades of continuous historical imagery to document the area’s rapid change.

These images of Iceland and Montcoal allow us to visit the areas affected by disaster and see how disasters are being documented, whether by major corporations like GeoEye, or by local interest groups like Appalachian Mountaintop Removal.