14 DAY TRIAL // The one who says that Google Earth is not useful is surely wrong. And today's piece of news comes to support this statement. Dr. Arthur Hickman, a government geologist, has spotted an impressive meteorite crater while using Google Earth and, as he sustains, he wasn't looking for such a thing on the downloadable mapping application.
According to The Sydney Morning Herald, a rare meteorite managed to create a crater with at least spectacular dimensions: 260 meters wide and 30 meters deep. Moreover, the researchers sustain the crater spotted in Pilbara, Western Australia, is between 10,000 and 100,000 years old.
What's more interesting is that there are only 173 such craters discovered in the entire world, the same publication has added. Moreover, the Pilbara crater is the 30th meteorite crater discovered in Australia and the first one since 2005.
"I wasn't looking for it. I was high up in Google Earth when I spotted this little circular structure which struck me as odd," Dr. Arthur Hickman told The Sydney Morning Herald.
This is not the first time when Google Earth helps researchers discover impressive things in the world. For example, some scientists turned to Google's downloadable mapping tool in order to track and monitor the volcanoes' activity in the region and be notified as soon as there's something dangerous around.
However, Google StreetView, the feature implemented in Google Maps and the function that seems to be capable of providing the largest amount of information of all technologies, was often criticized for showing too many details.
For example, a couple of people were spotted on Google StreetView doing all sorts of things although they had no intention to appear on such a popular web-service. As a response to the criticism issued by them, the Mountain View company said that their service only shows the images accessible from the street, but they have also struggled to meet all the users' requirements.