Abstract
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.
Highlights
The Earth’s lithosphere is the rigid, mechanically strong, outermost shell of the Earth
The LITHO1.0 model is in its native format, and a C++ source code, termed access_litho [9], is needed to extract the lithospheric information at any arbitrary location
The existing representations are only feasible for academic investigators, who are typically located at universities or research institutions, to conduct professional geological and geophysical research
Summary
The Earth’s lithosphere is the rigid, mechanically strong, outermost shell of the Earth. Up to now there are still no readily available methods for representing the global lithospheric structure derived from the existing lithospheric models on the Google Earth virtual globe. There is a clear need to develop a universal method forr the representation, dissemination, and visualization of the global lithospheric structure on Google Earth. Need to develop a universal method for the representation, dissemination, and visualization of the global lithospheric structure on Google Earth. Visualizing, analyzing and disseminating the global lithospheric structure on the Google Earth virtual-globe platform. In Google Earth, 3D solid models representing interior sublayers of the lithosphere are used for visualizing and analyzing the internal structure within each lithospheric cell. It opens up more possibilities to showcase the spatial distribution and property characteristic of the global lithosphere in a more visual, intuitive, appealing, and interactive way
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