I found this great mash-up which is used to watch 19 whales of the coast of Australia and New Zealand. If you’ve followed any of the recent environmental news, you’ve probably heard of the campaign against whale hunting (mostly done by the Japanese) in the South Pacific. Greenpeace has tagged 19 whales with global positioning devices that will allow scientists to monitor the whales over time and follow their trail (the Great Whale Trail) as they travel north towards Alaska. It has been a big scientific dilemma as to the exact course the whales take when migrating north, as they have been known to disappear from the scientists only to appear in the north later, without a clearly “visible” trail. This monitoring experiment hopes to collect position data that will finally give us an idea about how the whales migrate. Another reason for this experiment by Greenpeace is to prove that one doesn’t have to kill whales in order to study them, as claimed by the Japanese who said a large part of their whaling efforts are aimed at studying the whales. Anyway, you can see a nice mash-up of Google Maps and data gathered through global positioning technology which shows the “current” (not exactly; to prevent Japanese whaling ships from using this data, everything is delayed by an appropriate amount of time) position of the tracked whales. Some have names, while others are tagged with unique IDs.

To see the actual live position tracking go here.

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