John Davis was a veteran of the Nova Scotia fishing industry when the collapse of the Atlantic Canadian fish stocks in the mid-1990s forced him to abandon his life's work and turn his love of scouring the ocean floor for shipwrecks into a full-time job.
Now, Mr. Davis is sharing what was once his hobby with an Internet audience numbering in the millions, after Google Inc. chose the underwater footage filmed by his Halifax-based diving company to showcase the sunken vessels that litter the bottom of the world's oceans as part of its Google Earth service.
Yesterday, the search-engine kingpin officially launched Google Earth 5.0, the most ambitious upgrade to its popular satellite imaging and mapping service since its introduction in June, 2005.
The centrepiece of the upgrade is a new service called Ocean in Google Earth.
The service enables users to probe the depths of the bodies of water that cover 70 per cent of the Earth's surface.
Contained within Ocean is a feature known as Shipwrecks, where users can venture beneath the waves to find the final resting places of famous lost ships and explore more than 40 wrecks via videos provided by Mr. Davis's company, Eco-Nova Productions.
“Mankind has been interacting with the oceans since the first little wooden raft pushed off from shore,” Mr. Davis said. “Google has a sense of that. They have this overreaching view of the world and the important components and realize we don't know enough about the oceans.”
While Google Earth users could see the ocean in older versions of the service, it was limited to low-resolution images. The new expanded edition allows users to go beneath the surface with 20 layers of additional information, including the Shipwrecks layer.
Canadian users can also see the rate at which ice is disappearing from the Arctic, track the migrations of satellite-tagged sea life and use the Dead Zone layer to explore areas unable to sustain marine life, such as the St. Lawrence Estuary and Vancouver Island's Saanich Inlet.
When Mr. Davis founded Eco-Nova in 1994, he invited European diving crews to explore the shipwrecks off the coast of Nova Scotia. Soon, the company, with the help of the province and Parks Canada, was retraining out-of-work fishing boat captains to become diving boat captains.
It wasn't long before Eco-Nova was helping to produce a pair of documentary series, Oceans of Mystery and The Sea Hunters; the latter contributed to the company's involvement with Google.
Mr. Davis's team of Canadian divers has been instrumental in helping to locate some of the most famous lost vessels in history, including: the RMS Carpathia, which rescued survivors from the RMS Titanic; U-215, the only German U-boat to be found in Canadian waters; and the famous ghost ship Mary Celeste, discovered off the coast of Haiti.
For the past six years, Mr. Davis has been working on a second business, Shipwreck Central, that would use the company's shipwreck dive footage for a website where nautical enthusiasts could pay a subscription fee to follow along with his crew's past and future underwater adventures. He hopes that Shipwreck Central's connection to Google Earth will help steer the firm closer to that goal.
“Hopefully we'll get a chance to be an overnight success,” he said. “You struggle and struggle and struggle and then you get an opportunity like this.”
In addition to the wonders of the deep, Google Earth users will also now be able to view the evolution of certain locations through history. Using the “historical imagery” option, it is possible to view the development of cities, such as London and Las Vegas, over time through the use of archival satellite footage.
Google Earth 5.0 video preview
