Some people get lost in a book. I get lost in Google Earth. And then Google Street View, and FlightAware.com and MarineTraffic.com.
It absolutely boggles my mind how much information is out there these day - information that 20, 30 years ago, most top-secret cleared intelligence officers would have given their eye teeth for and perhaps a few other choice body parts.
Before I get into the mother of all coolness, Google Earth, let me point out a little discovery I just made. As I type this, there is a plane flying almost straight over the North Pole. That plane is a Boeing 777 that departed from Seattle-Tacoma International. It took off at 5:53 p.m. PDT. Its arrival is expected to be 9:09 p.m. GST at Dubai International. Its great circle route will have it fly almost straight north to nearly the North Pole, and then straight south again to Dubai, crossing Canadian and Russian airspace along the way. I've heard of planes flying "over the pole." This is the first time I've realized they do indeed fly over the pole. Santa could intercept them. This knowledge is courtesy of FlightAware.com.
Using the same website, you can enter the tail number/letters of any plane you see, be it on a news report, in a newspaper article or in person and find out who it is registered to and the tracks of its most recent flights.
Similarly, you can plot the course and speed of almost any ship in the world that has similar tracking installed via MarineTraffic.com, as long as those ships are within reporting areas (generally near coasts). Remember several years ago when the Cougar Ace, a roll-on, roll-off car carrier flipped on its side off the Aleutian Islands, but didn't sink? Well, entering Cougar Ace (which miraculously has not been renamed) and you find out that it was travelling at 15.7 knots on a course of 288 degrees heading for the port of Hakodate on the south shore of Hokkaido Island, Japan.
Google Earth now has the ability to show the same terrain over many different times. In some areas, only one or two images may be in the publicly available database. In other places, I've seen as many as 15 different entries on a timeline. Using this you can track things like growth of cities, development of coal mines, and even how many vehicles were on the driveway of your former house on Sept. 2, 2005, as an example. (One camper van, white; one '68 Buick, white; one Geo Metro, black; one Chev Cavalier, black. The detail is not good enough for someone else to identify them, but I recognize them.)
Similarly, you can track the numerous changes over the years at the Queen Elizabeth Power Station in Saskatoon, including the removal of the coal conveyor.
Google Street View now has the ability to do that as well - track things over time. In July, 2009, four months after we sold that house, there were no vehicles parked in front of it. But in June, 2013, there was a white Dodge Caravan minivan and what looks like a white Jeep Compass. There's also a blue aluminum boat, probably 14 feet in length. The current owners have removed the porch I liked so much, removed some window dressing on the garage, and put up a new fence. It was shot again that same month, from the other side of the road, and this time the Jeep was not there.
The maps function of Bing.com does not have the "Birds eye view" of my old home, but it does have my current home. These were shot from a low flying plane, at approximately a 45 degree angle, from four different sides. That means that the plane flew a grid pattern over Estevan to get every angle of every building in the city. These pictures were shot prior to us taking possession in late 2008, because I can see the prior owner's trampoline in the back yard. Google Street View photographed our current house in August 2009 and July 2013. That aforementioned power plant was done three times.
Am I pointing this out to be creepy? No. I'm doing this simply to prove a point, showing what sort of information can be gleaned from free, easily accessible websites, all without leaving your basement. That's not counting proprietary stuff, like realty listings. With Realtor.ca, and their smartphone app, you can drive down any street, see a realty sign, and inspect all the photos of that house listing from the curb without so much as leaving your car. After those houses are sold, that listing may come down, but I'm sure someone with the right credentials could look it up. Data never truly goes away.
As I finish typing this, I just checked, that plane is now at 89.71 degrees north latitude, or 20.1 miles from the pole, its closest approach. At its last reported altitude of 32,000 feet, a passenger looking out their right-side window, with eyes that were extremely sharp and could see in the dark, would have a direct line of sight to Santa's workshop.
Good thing Santa's not a terrorist.
Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
