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Visit the Amazon on World Forest Day with Street View
3/21/12
(Cross Posted on
Official Google Blog
)
Last August, a few members of our Brazil and U.S.
Street View
and
Google Earth Outreach
teams
were invited to the Amazon Basin
to collect ground-level images of the rivers, forest and communities in the Rio Negro Reserve. Today, on World Forest Day, we’re making those images available through the Street View feature on
Google Maps
. Now anyone can experience the beauty and diversity of the Amazon.
Tributary of the Rio Negro -
View Larger Map
Take a virtual boat ride down the
main section of the Rio Negro
, and float up into the
smaller tributaries where the forest is flooded
. Stroll along the
paths of Tumbira
, the largest community in the Reserve, or visit some of the
other communities
who invited us to share their lives and cultures. Enjoy a hike through along an
Amazon forest trail
and
see where Brazil nuts are harvested
. You can even see a
forest critter
if you look hard enough!
Amazon Rainforest -
View Larger Map
This project was made possible in partnership with the
Amazonas Sustainable Foundation (FAS)
, the local nonprofit conservation organization that invited us to the area. We used the
Street View trike
and a tripod camera with a fisheye lens—typically used to capture imagery of
business interiors
—to capture both the natural landscape and the local communities. In all, more than 50,000 still photos were stitched together to create these immersive, 360-degree panoramic views:
Many areas of the Amazon, including Rio Negro Reserve, are under the protection of the Brazilian government with restricted access to the public, so we hope that this Street View collection provides access to this special corner of the planet that many of us otherwise wouldn’t have the chance to experience. Together with FAS, we’re thrilled to help everyone from researchers and scientists to armchair explorers around the world learn more about the Amazon, and better understand how local communities there are working to preserve this unique environment for future generations.
To do this directly from maps you can go to Brazil map and drag Pegman to the Rio Negro River
Start exploring this portion of the Amazon and other collections around the world on the updated Street View site and
gallery
.
Posted by Karin Tuxen-Bettman, Project Lead for Google Street View in the Amazon
Helping the Hooch with water conservation at our Douglas County data center
3/15/12
If you’re familiar with the work of the Southern poet
Sidney Lanier
, you’ll know he
wrote
about the beauty of the Chattahoochee River in Georgia. “The Hooch,” as it’s known around here, starts up in the northeastern part of the state, runs through Atlanta and down into Alabama before emptying out into the Gulf of Mexico. Those of us who work in Google’s Douglas County, Ga. data center have a special fondness for the Chattahoochee because it’s an integral part of our ability to run a highly efficient facility.
Google’s data centers use half the energy of a typical data center in part because we rely on
free cooling
rather than energy hungry mechanical chillers. In Douglas County, like at most of our facilities, we use evaporative cooling, which brings cold water into the data center to cool the servers, then releases it as water vapor through cooling towers.
A typical data center can use hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day. When we first built the Georgia facility in 2007, the water we used came from the local potable (drinking) water supply. But we soon realized that the water we used didn’t need to be clean enough to drink. So we talked to the Douglasville-Douglas County Water and Sewer Authority (known locally as the WSA) about setting up a system that uses reuse water—also known as grey- or recycled water—in our cooling infrastructure. With this system in place, we’re able to use recycled water for 100 percent of our cooling needs.
This video of the system includes never-before-seen footage of our Douglas County facility:
Here’s how it works: The WSA has a water treatment facility in Douglasville, Ga. that cleans wastewater from the local communities and releases it back into the Chattahoochee. We worked with the WSA to build a side-stream plant about five miles west of our data center that diverts up to 30 percent of the water that would have gone back into the river; instead we send it through the plant for treatment and then on to the data center. Any water that doesn’t evaporate during the cooling process then goes to an Effluent Treatment Plant located on-site. There, we treat the water once again to disinfect it, remove mineral solids and send it back out to the Chattahoochee—clean, clear and safe.
The Chattahoochee provides drinking water, public greenspace and recreational activities for millions of people. In fact, just two weeks ago it was the first river to be designated a National Water Trail in a new system
announced
by the Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar—a system that encourages community stewardship of local waterways. We’re glad to do our part in creating an environmentally sustainable economy along the shores of the Hooch.
Posted by Jim Brown, Data Center Facilities Manager
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