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 .
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
These days there are a lot of openly available spatial data in the cloud. Because of number of reasons - political, financial, lack of understanding on the open source software and open data to name a few - Iceland is suffering from the lack of vector map data in Google Maps and Google Earth. Here are some links to add Iceland to: Goolge Maps: example 1 , exapmple 2 Google Earth: example 1 , exapmple 2