NOAA recently released a collection of more than 7,000 historical U.S. shoreline topographic images for viewing in Google Earth. The NOAA Historical Shoreline Survey Viewer has thousands of layers that you use to see what the U.S. shoreline looked like going back as far as 1841. The layers can be viewed alone or your can overlay them on top of current imagery. You can launch the KMZ file for this imagery by clicking here or you can read about how to navigate this imagery on the NOAA page. I recommend reading NOAA’s information before launching the KMZ file.

Applications for Education
NOAA’s Historical Shoreline Survey Viewer could be used to show students how coastlines have changed over time. I found it quite interesting to compare the past shoreline imagery with current imagery of famous fishing towns like Gloucester, Massachusetts. As they view the past and present imagery, ask students to try to explain why the coastlines have changed.

H/T to the Google Earth Blog.