NASA Worldwind, & Large scale features in Africa

Hi folks, 'been a while since I've passed by these parts, much
going on in life to keep me from idle hours at the usenet trough.

I have recently been introduced to NASA WorldWind earth viewer.
I highly, highly recommend it. It does for the world what the
google maps satellite view offers for the US, plus more - you
can drop your viewpoint to ground level and radar topology data
automagically kicks in to show the terrain in relief. For a
large-scale geology fan, this thing is just hours and hours and
hours of fun. Ultimate resolution over the globe except the high
polar regions appears to be in the order of 20 metres.

It is found at a site that runs something like worldwind.nasa.gov,
or something very similar. Warning: it is quite resource intensive.
It runs from a free downloadable viewer, which installs with a
first level data set in 500MB or so. Upon use, it fetches further
data from the net as you zoom, and you are advised to have a couple
of free Gigs for it to fill with cache. The realtime zoom and
drag require a good 3D vidcard, and I imagine spinning round in the
ground view with relief taxes the vidcard even more. The net fetch
puts a fair load on your IP connection, and dialup is not recommended,
so it really wants a high end machine for best results. As mine
is rather that way in most respects these days, I can't say how
the performance degrades with a less powerful machine.

Anyway, spending happy hours drifting about the virtual globe, I have
noticed a distinct feature in western Libya, along the border with
Algeria. It appears to be a pair of concentric arcs, representing say 9
o'clock to noon, which if completed would encircle a region slightly
smaller than Spain. And indeed there seem to be other features which could
be candidates for further outcroppings of a circular structure, around 4
to 6 oclock. Well, obviously the notion of meteor crater comes to mind,
but I haven't heard of this being proposed for this region, and were it,
it would be far and away the largest known. I presume this feature is
well known, and there is another explanation for it, and I wondered
if you folks could enlighten me about it. Thanks.

--
==========================================================================
vincent@triumf[munge].ca Pete Vincent
Disclaimer: all I know I learned from reading Usenet.
.

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