Earth, cut in half.
February 23, 2011 4:30 PM Subscribe
Is anyone aware of an image that's been generated depicting the whole circle of the earth in section view, showing the topography of the relevant land masses and sea floors?
posted by brightghost to Science & Nature (15 answers total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
It occurs to me that I've never, as far as I can remember, seen such a thing. Of course there are many small-scale images like this, but I'd like to find one that shows the entire circle of the earth in section view, if it exists. My google searches aren't turning up anything; surely someone's created such a thing before? All I can find are a number of "section cuts" of the earth which are really cutaways of a quadrant of the sphere, showing the geologic layers. I'm not particularly interested in the geology inside the earth, but rather the topography of the surface and it's scale relative to the earth's volume. I realize the detail of the surface is quite minute compared to the earth's size, which is part of why I find the idea of such an image so intriguing. That said, I expect it would probably have to be quite high-resolution to show anything meaningful; perhaps unfeasibly high? Still, it seems like something some topography nerd or another would have tried to tackle, even if it has to be executed in many sections...
Failing the whole earth, a similar visualization of a particular ocean/land-mass section would also be interesting.
While I doubt I would have the time to tackle such a problem anytime soon, I would also be interested in suggestions for generating such a whole-earth image from available datasets if one doesn't yet exist.