Update: Google Maps has now been updated with the latest images, so will look the same as Google Earth

During last year’s war in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel, excellent Google Earth news site Ogle Earth mentioned that Google would “soon” be updating the images of Lebanon, but were keen to stress that this was not side-taking on the controversial conflict.

However, for some reason these images did not appear in Google Earth and Lebanon appeared as pre-conflict up until the most recent image update just a few days ago. Google Maps has not yet received the same image update, so until it does we can use the two sources to compare areas before and after.

Central Beruit, Before:

Central Beruit, After:

Runways at Beirut International Airport, Before:

Runways at Beirut International Airport, After:

If you zoom in on the runways you’ll also see that they’re busying repairing bomb craters:

The full story of the conflict is, of course, on Wikipedia.

Although Antarctica’s official population is zero, there is usually between 1,000 to 4,000 people living and working on the mostly uninhabitable continent.

These people are representatives of the 30 countries which operate year-round or summer research stations at various locations, many of which are now viewable in Google Earth. Today we’re going to look at a few of these stations.

Russia’s Mirny station was established during the 1st Soviet Antarctica Expedition and one of the buildings has CCCP (Russian for USSR) painted on its roof.

Australia’s Casey station is a collection of colourful buildings established in 1959. The headquarters at Casey (known as the “Big Red Shed”) are likely the largest building on Antarctica.

Casey station also has a webcam, and you can see a typical day on Antarctica by watching the fantastic time lapse video of yesterday’s shots.

Antarctica has at least 20 private airports for the coming and going of all the staff, and at the UK’s Rothera Research Station we can see the snow-covered 900m runway.

Wikipedia lists 64 currently active stations, so there’s no doubt much more to be found on Antarctica.

Thanks: bruv, Gearthhacks & Rebay

For all those who are already sick of Street View, Google have added loads of new imagery and terrain to Google Earth.

The full list of what’s new is on the community forum and Google Earth Blog is keeping up with the latest developments.

Get submitting those new sites sights!

Update June 8th: The new images are now also available in Google Maps

This is the bizarre Spiral Jetty, a huge piece of land art on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Built of mud, salt crystals, basalt rocks and earth, it forms a 1500 foot long (~450 metre), 15-foot wide counterclockwise coil, which extends from the lake shore. It was actually entirely submerged by rising lake waters for many years, but due to lowering water levels, has since re-emerged.

Spiral Jetty was built all the way back in 1970 by the late American sculptor Robert Smithson, who also created some other pieces of land art which are still visible on Google Earth, including the 1971 piece Spiral Hill, Broken Circle in Emmen, Holland.

See other spirals on GSS, and read more about Spiral Jetty at Wikipedia.

Thanks to Dan Blue and Mike Shubeck.

The interest in Google’s new Street View mode has been incredible, and there’s been coverage of it everywhere¹ – meaning that lots of other sites have posted stuff before we did, including:

E.T. spotted in a field – with a laser beam it seems:

A vehicle caught speeding:

A reflection of one of the vans used to capture all of these images:

A guy caught leaving a strip club:

A guy caught going into an adult book store:

A shot of a person who happened to bend over at an unfortunate moment:

The Boing Boing story² of how someone found their cat on Street Views:

…and many others – in fact there’s also been a number of new sites springing up which have begun to collect these Street View locations, including streetviewr.com, LaudonTech, streetviewvoyeur.com, Streetview Notables and there’s a Wired page collecting them too.

Of course here at GSS, we’ll continue to provide you the cream of the crop of Street Views, alongside our regularly scheduled programming!

Thanks to everyone who has submitted one of these sights, and to all the sites who are collecting them.