(Clockwise, from upper left) Seven-square-mile views of Manhattan; Chaganbulage Administrative Village in Inner Mongolia; Venice, Italy; and farms in Plymouth, Washington # © Google
Every now and then, it is good to just let the mind wander. And some of those times, visual prompts are the fastest way to get from here to there.
A seven-square-mile snapshot of the 2,700,000-square-mile Amazon rainforest in Brazil #© Google
Thanks to the Atlantic’s Senior Editor of the photo section, Alan Taylor, for this:
Seven Square Miles
Spending time looking at the varying and beautiful images of our planet from above in Google Earth, zooming in and out at dizzying rates, I thought it would be interesting to compare all of these vistas at a fixed scale—to see what New York City, Venice, or the Grand Canyon would look like from the same virtual height. So, the following images are snapshots from Google Earth, all rectangles of the same size and scale, approximately three and a half miles (5.6 kilometers) wide by two miles (3.2 kilometers) tall—showing seven square miles (18.1 square kilometers, or 4,480 acres) of the surface of our planet in each view.
Sand dunes of the Tengger Desert encroach on Chaganbulage Administrative Village in China’s Inner Mongolia. See it on Google Maps. # © Google
Seven square miles encompassing parts of Shinjuku and Nakano in Tokyo, Japan # © Google
See all 39 photos here.
Organikos 