Were Carolina bays created by the Saginaw Impact Manifold?
by Google Earth Blog on Jun.29, 2010, under 3D Models, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, California, Denmark, England, Germany, Google Earth News, Google Earth Tips, Google Sky, Google maps, Hawaii, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Natural Landmarks, Netherlands, Sightseeing, Street Views, USA
If you spent much time in the Google Earth Community, you have have come across a post by Michael Davias about the Saginaw Impact Manifold.
The basic idea behind this theory is that a cosmic impact struck the eastern part of what is now known as Michigan, which spread debris across the country and created many of the Carolina bays that are out there. The impact itself carved out Saginaw Bay, creating the mitten shape that the state currently resembles.
Because this idea is still just a theory, Michael is using Google Earth to try to determine the validity of it. Most of his data can be found in this KMZ file
or via the Google Earth plugin, the results of which are seen here:
Here are his words regarding the data above:
The kml file has placemarks with annotations that function as an index to the ~180 "fields" of bays being researched. This was done to minimize the memory hit from the collection of LiDAR images being used. Each placemark's pop-up presents a small jpg of the LiDAR image, and has a link to the actual LiDAR data as a network-linked kmz file. The LiDAR imagery was created in Global Mapper, using their KML generation output feature, and typically contains several levels of increasingly-higher resolution imagery, revealed as the user zooms in. They are big, seveal as large as 10 MB.
For more on all of this, I highly recommend you view the full thread in the GEC. He's taken a lot of data into account, and done a great job of using Google Earth to present it.