Spending time looking at the varying and beautiful images of our planet from above in Google Earth, zooming in and out at dizzying rates, I thought it would be interesting to compare all of these vistas at a fixed scale—to see what New York City, Venice, or the Grand Canyon would look like from the same virtual height. So, the following images are snapshots from Google Earth, all rectangles of the same size and scale, approximately three and a half miles (5.6 kilometers) wide by two miles (3.2 kilometers) tall—showing seven square miles (18.1 square kilometers, or 4,480 acres) of the surface of our planet in each view.
Seven Square Miles
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(Clockwise, from upper left) Seven-square-mile views of Manhattan; Chaganbulage Administrative Village in Inner Mongolia; Venice, Italy; and farms in Plymouth, Washington #
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Sand dunes of the Tengger Desert encroach on Chaganbulage Administrative Village in China's Inner Mongolia. See it on Google Maps. #
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A seven-square-mile view of mountains and rock formations near the town of Torotoro in the Charcas province of Bolivia. Note the twisting road carved through a pass at far left. See it mapped. #
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Seven square miles of Washington, D.C., from the Lincoln Memorial near the Potomac River (center left) to the United States Capitol (center right), and surrounding neighborhoods #
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A section of northern Mbuji-Mayi, the capital city of Kasai-Oriental province in the Democratic Republic of Congo. See it mapped. #
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A solitary farm on a dirt road inside seven square miles of the Atacama Desert near Pica, Chile. See it on Google Maps. #
© Google
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