Earth Elevation CROSS-SECTIONS ALONG MERIDIANS

Notes

The highest mountain ranges and the deepest oceanic trenches

I've been working with elevation and bathymetry data as part of my quest to make beautiful, tactile, custom wooden globes:

You can pre-order your own fully three-dimensional maps and globes, carved into fine hardwood, at the goodwoodglobes crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo.

This animation shows cross-sections through the continents and the oceans along circles of longitude, as a complement to my previous visualization Earth Elevations - cross-sections along parallels, which shows cross-sections along circles of latitude.

You can use the slider on the right to set the longitude. The layout with the South Pole on the left, the North Pole on the right and longitude decreasing over time is comparable to the view you'd get if you were floating in space above the Equator, looking west, as the Earth spins beneath you.

I've used a vertical exaggeration of ×500 for this visualization, compared to ×1000 for the previous one, since a meridian from the South Pole to the North Pole is half the length of the Equator.