In Google Earth , the ultimate free Geographic Information System ( GIS ), Iceland looks like an undiscovered island - pure and clean. Well, that was the case until today. I liked the way it looked before but I needed something more - information. In other words, I was missing the functionally of my legendary web site Icelandic Gazetteer (In Icelandic: Örnefnaskrá Íslands ), which I made in the spring of 2000. At first, I decided to add some forest on the map of Iceland. It looked like that: Pretty Iceland! It looks so different from what the peaceful vikings left us after vegetationally vandalizing the island. Then I decided to add toponyms with some additional place names' features. Iceland became even more beautiful. And water bodies: So, this morning I was curious to see how all the data features would combine in 3D. So, East Iceland looked like this: Cool indeed. Now you can download Iceland Toponyms (20080712) directly to your Google Earth program. It is not pref...
I flew over Iceland! Main emphasis of the flight was to observe in the late summer the vegetation, i.e. carbon production in North East Iceland. It was part of my Ph.D. study in University of Iceland. It was made thanks to my amazing supervisors. We were flying on Cessna 185. I measured the track of the flight with my Garmin 60CS GPS receiver. Below you can see the map of the flight. Red line shows the flight from Reykjavæík to Egilsstaðir where after refueling we flew back to Reykjavík seen on the orange line. The blue lines defines the catchment boundaries of the rivers I studied in my Ph.D. research. View Larger Map Here you can some of the thousands of the photos we did on one of the most beautiful places on this World. See also photos mapped here or for Google Earth here .
I started my mobile GIS of Iceland in 2001. This GIS was totally made by open source programs and it was hosted on one of my servers at the University of Iceland, set up with the help of bofh.is . On the photos bellow you can see my then water, shock and dust proof mobile Siemens ME45 running this interactive GIS of Iceland. You clearly can see the map on a mono display, map features, map scale, ESSO petrol stations, reference map. Some of the layer are query-able. The waterfall in the background is Dettifoss , located in Jökulsárgljúfur National Park of Northeast Iceland. The river is Jökulsá á Fjöllum and it plays significant part of my Ph.D. research and my life but this is another story. The photos were taken on 20.06.2004, then I didn't know that exactly 4 years later on the same day I will defend my Ph.D. thesis in Geography at the University of Iceland.