Now, perhaps you are someone who needs a bit more inspiration than watching a video and clicking a link to find a park, or maybe you’re not in a position to take a hike or walk at all.
In that case, perhaps a “virtual” hike might help you celebrate. There are actually a surprising number of ways to take those on the Web.
For example, the U.S. National Park Service maintains a page for that, too.
In addition, many of the parks’ websites have “Photos and Multimedia” pages that include “virtual” experiences. Here is an example from the Grand Canyon.
There are also many 360° videos on YouTube that provide virtual visits to National Parks.
For example, Air Pano has made quite a few of them. Here are links to pages on their website for three of them. Their home page has a map where you can find more.
Of course, Google doesn’t just make it so that you can immerse yourself in YouTube videos — they are also behind Google Earth. Here’s their “virtual visit” to the Grand Canyon.
Finally, writing this post inspired me to create this 360° experience called Hiking Trails Hall.
Click the “doors” to enter 360° virtual parks and “i”s for information about them.
If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it directly on Kuula.
All of this nudged me to update the “nature” pages on Cosma. One thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, I was inspired to create this entire Nature Center with three other spaces to explore in addition to Hiking Trails Hall. Again, click “doors” to enter 360° experiences, “i”s for information about them, and arrows to go to other areas of the Nature Center. Some objects also link to fun 360° experiences.
If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it directly on Kuula.
What I didn’t expect was that a two minute excursion into a cave would turn into a fascinating journey into speleology. One thing just led to another, and that’s what happened.
It all started because the video and story about the cave reminded of my own experiences in Mammoth Cave. It’s in Kentucky, and I grew up in Indy — it wasn’t that far away, so I visited it numerous times over the years.
In case you’ve never been, here’s a link to a quick peek.
Each visit was a bit different, but the one thing that I remember most was that Mammoth Cave was billed as the largest cave on Earth. After many hours of tours, it felt like it, too.
Ha, what I saw hardly scratched the surface, literally and figuratively!
It was a bit mind-bending when they zoomed out to show the true scale of the place. Yet that was nothing compared to what I tripped across next.
It turns out that Mammoth Cave was the largest cave, but it’s not anymore.
That honor belongs to Son Doong Cave in Vietnam. It was “discovered” in 1991, but it wasn’t really explored until 2009. Wow, it’s positively Verne’esque — it even has a jungle!
Here’s a link to a video about how photographer and journalist Martin Edström went on a 360° photo expedition into the cave for National Geographic.
Here’s a 360° video of another ice cave under Pemberton Icefield in British Columbia. Not surprisingly, the lifespan of such wonders in our current climate also comes up in the video.
That was mesmerizing, but there is a Giant Crystal Cave in Mexico made out of gypsum instead of ice that might be even more stunning to see. Unfortunately, you can’t.
Luckily here’s a video that shows a bit of what it looks like as well as explains why you really don’t want to see it in person.
I was bummed that I couldn’t find great footage of Crystal Cave. However, while searching for that, I found this fun 360° video of the Waitomo Glowworm Caves in New Zealand.
Near the end of my unexpected detour into caves, I found this neat 360° video and lesson about ancient cave paintings. It’s about art, creativity and communication. These are all near and dear to my heart, so I couldn’t resist including it.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this speleological detour as much as I did. If you want to continue exploring caves on your own, here are some resources to get you started.
If you have been Yellowstone National Park, then you know it is a vast, beautiful place with some fairly odd geologic features that smell bad, like rotten eggs. If you’ve never been there, then you might just have a fairly apocalyptic view of it because of the supervolcano under it that has been featured in disaster movies.
Here’s a link to a short short introduction about what is above and below the surface.
Sometimes exploring news about Yellowstone can be interesting in unexpected ways. For example, I triped across a story about how studying life in Yellowstone’s toxic soup could help us find out if there’s life on Mars!
April 22nd is Earth Day! In honor of that, here are some great ways to see the honoree.
First, you can get a nice view from this neat 360° video from Seeker. It essentially shows you what it would feel like if you could just fly straight up and see the Earth from space.
For a really, really extreme wide shot of Earth, there’s a relatively hot off the press snap from New Horizons. It was taken from about 3.79 billion miles away. Not surprisingly, this is the record for the furthest away a picture of Earth has ever been taken, and this video covers both the shot as well as some interesting context about how it was taken.
Of course, the video paid a humble tribute to the iconic Pale Blue Dot (Planetary Society) image taken by Voyager 1 that was then made famous by this commentary by Carl Sagan.
Those are certainly some awe inspiring views of Earth! Along the way it is hard not to notice that NASA has a lot to do with all of those long shots.
As great as it is to have the pictures and the knowledge from the missions, it turns out that NASA keeps pretty busy taking care of our home planet, too. Here’s a lovely article that Forbes published for Earth Day that highlights the many ways that NASA is working to save the Earth.
Last week NASA released this fascinating video entitled Our Living Planet based upon 20 years of data from satellites that observe all plant life at the surface of the land and ocean.
Of course, releasing fantastic imagery like this is nothing new for NASA — they have a long and illustrious history of sharing iconic imagery to amaze and inspire people around the world.
The most famous image NASA ever shared is the photo known as Earthrise. It was taken by astronaut Bill Anders in 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission, and it was the first time a human ever saw the whole earth from space. Here is a video about the image that was released in 2013 on the image’s 45th anniversary.
The next most famous image from NASA is probably The Blue Marble. It was taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. Here is a NASA video from 2015 that discusses the original image as well as newer imagery captured by the Deep Space Climate Observatory.
These two images may be the most famous, but thanks to Carl Sagan, none has been more inspirational than the Pale Blue Dot. It was captured by Voyager 1, and here is a video of Sagan unveiling the photo in 1990.
Of course, NASA continues to share awesome imagery from time to time. For example, back in 2012 they released Earth at Night. It is also sometimes called “The Black Marble,” and it is an animation of Earth’s city lights assembled from data from the Suomi NPP satellite.
NASA has already released numerous 360° Videos related to other planets, so it is only a matter of time before they release an explorable 360° image or video of Earth. In the meantime you can enjoy this 360° Video created by the Opaque Media Group to promote their VR application Earthlight.
