Novan Iman Santosa, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
When Wednesday's powerful earthquake hit Bengkulu and West Sumatra, most local television stations broadcast a short notice of the tremor's details: its magnitude, what time it took place and its location.
The Meteorology and Geophysics Agency (BMG) announced the epicenter's location by its latitude and longitude coordinates.
Many people who wanted to know its exact location could only get a sketchy picture, since not everyone can easily translate ""440'12.00""S, 1017'48.00""E"".
The additional information given by the agency of ""some 179 kilometers southwest of Bengkulu"" also did not help much.
In the past, finding the exact location would have involved opening a map and fussing for a long time over latitude and longitude lines. But the virtual map Google Earth has changed all that.
By entering the coordinates, you can easily find that the epicenter of the Bengkulu tremor was located in the Indian Ocean, somewhere halfway between Bengkulu's Enggano Island and Pagai Selatan Island in West Sumatra's Mentawai Islands.
A series of announcements released by the BMG revealed that there were dozens of aftershocks in the area over the next 24 hours.
Using Good Earth, you can also calculate the distance from the epicenter to a nearest town, or any other cities, using the program's ruler tool.
The handy ruler tool can be used in two ways -- line and path. The line calculates the distance between two points while the path settings can be used to calculate a series of distance such as a travel route.
The ""geobrowser"", a term used by the Economist in its technology special report on Sept. 6, also has a number of layers that can be imposed on the earth's surface. These include transportation networks, national borders, volcanoes, you name it.
Google Earth application can be downloaded for free from http://earth.google.com.
Google Earth gets its images from various source such as NASA and private digital imaging firm DigitalGlobe.
DigitalGlobe has in the past provided the public with a number of high-resolution images from the Dec. 26, 2004 tsunami for free.
A number of other digital geospatial services are also available in addition to DigitalGlobe and Google Earth. These include EarthSat, GeoEye, GlobeXplorer and Pictometry.
Google Earth is by far the most popular application, perhaps because its basic version comes for free.
Being a virtual globe, you can turn the map upside down, or left to right as if playing with the Earth itself.
Some places, such as the Petronas twin towers in Kuala Lumpur and the Eiffel Tower in Paris, can also been seen in three dimensions. Unfortunately, a 3-D model of Jakarta's National Monument is not yet available.
More traditional map services such as Google Maps and Wikimapia also render two-dimensional images for users after that format.
Interested users can upgrade their basic Google Earth to Google Earth Plus with an annual fee of US$20 designed for individual mapping enthusiasts with GPS capability.
Commercial business may want to subscribe to the more comprehensive Google Earth Pro at a fee of $400 per year.
Some critics say Google Earth could cause ""threats to national security"" by exposing vital installations such as military bases and other potential targets such as infrastructures. Others have also have complained of intrusions into privacy.
Despite these concerns, it is still a cheaper and more interesting way to visit far-away places than the old-style atlases. And it's more accurate too.
