Thanks to the brand new image update, Google maps’ satellite imagery now covers the Spanish island of Lanzarote in glorious high-resolution imagery – just in time to make this year’s volcano day! Lanzarote is a volcanic island which consists of literally hundreds of volcanoes – far too many for me to point them all out, but here’s some highlights:

Make sure you do scroll around to get a proper feel for the place though. You could even drop by the the tourist trap to watch guides throwing branches into the ground to be set alight by the heat below the surface!

Wait. That was when I was actually there, and not something I saw in these images….

I was on Lanzarote years ago for a family holiday, which seems strange now as the place should probably be nearly inhospitable – a quarter of the island’s surface is covered by lava, of 213 km of coastline only 10 km are sand (much of which I seem to remember was black), and every year the island is whipped by sandstorms which arrive from Africa carrying Saharan sands!

However this does mean that Lanzarote is pretty much the place to go for wind and kite surfing.

Thanks to Amio cajander and Jedi Master Kalimero.

Update: Since posting this 4 hours ago, Mount Oyama has been updated to some jaw-dropping high-resolution imagery. Timing huh!?

This is Mount Oyama on the Japanese island of Miyakejima, which is seen here spouting a rather impressive plume of steam. In August 2000 all the island’s inhabitants were evacuated due to the eruptions which started in July of that year. Described as a “3,000 foot column of steam, smoke, and ash [rising] skyward”, could this be a picture of that eruption?

The islands residents weren’t allowed to return return permanently until February 2005 – nearly 5 years later!

Thanks to Greenek.

Google Earth Blog reports that Google Earth has had a huge imagery update with satellite and aerial pics across the globe.

The images haven’t made their way into Maps yet, so if you click the image below you’ll just get an out-of-focus empty shore, but click the Google Earth link and you’ll fly to one of the super-cool artificial Palm Islands in Dubai.

There’s loads of things to see all over the place so hopefully we’ll see the images in Google Maps soon!

These are the Diomede Islands, two islands only 3km apart but one is in Russia, the other in the USA. These islands are right in the middle of the Bering Straights and the international dateline runs right in between them. Therefore, you can stand on the eastern island in Alaska and look into “tomorrow” in Russia, pretty trippy.

The Diomede Islands are often mentioned as likely intermediate stops for some kind of bridge or tunnel spanning the Bering Straits, which would be one big and expensive bridge!

Thanks: Adrian & Gut

A year ago today we posted about a Giant Alien Dolphin in the Pacific Ocean. It turned out that this was actually a group of islands known as French Frigate Shoals, which has since received a small image update on Google Maps. Although there’s still not very high-res imagery, you can now more clearly see the islands, and they no longer look like a giant alien dolphin.

Now they look like an embryonic earth-dwelling dolphin

The islands consist of a 20-mile long crescent-shaped reef with twelve sandbars, and other than the numerous plant, bird and marine life, they’re currently inhabited by a total of 2 biologists.

More on French Frigate Shoals at Wikipedia.

P.S. You can always see what we posted a year ago by using the “one year ago today…” feature in the sidebar.