Mountains from Space – a book based on remote sensing data for supporting public understanding of science

Abstract

The cartographic depiction of high mountain areas has always been a challenge to generations of cartographers, surveyers and geographers. The maps resulting from this work contain a wide range of information, which are difficult to understand for a non-expert community. Hence the fascination of high mountain areas was up to now mostly reserved to experts and climbers. New techniques in Computer based visualization and especially the possibility to generate virtual landscapes allow for a much more comprehensible and completely new perspective of mountain areas. The ease of access to high resolution digital elevation models and the vast availability of very detailed remote sensing data – like e.g. from the IKONOS-satellite – complement these techniques. This combination of data and technology gives the cartographer and geographer a comprehensive tool for generating high quality images of mountains. Motivated by its work of the past years and recent developments in visualization the German Remote Sensing Center initiated a new approach to unveil the beauty of high mountains all over the world. Specialists in remote sensing technology and the earth sciences together with some of the worlds most reputed mountaineers – among them Reinhold Messner, Maurice Herzog ,Sir Edmund Hillary and Stephan Venables – developed a concept for a book integrating different aspects of mountainous regions of the world. Targeted at the broader non-expert public a wide range of remote sensing material and computer based perspective views were generated and compiled in a high quality book titled “Mountains from space”. The core of the book is geographic content – illuminating history, geology, geomorphology, climatology and weather as well as many other phenomena concerning mountains. The over 150 large format colour views of mountains from space show the audience a wide variety of digital, satellite based maps not shown in this context before. In this paper the technology especially adapted for the generation of the maps will be discussed.