Fourteen new views of the Earth are available from the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency announced today.

The views are part of a set of 20 slides that show the Earth in full color shaded relief, showing land and undersea topography. "The planet is seen from vantage points over the poles and each major ocean and land mass," said Peter Sloss of NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center in Boulder, Colo., which produced the images. The slide set also includes a rectangular Mercator projection view of the whole Earth, and displays of crustal plates and their relation to world seismic activity. The images are computer-generated from a digital database of oceanic bathymetry and land topography.

The slides replace a previous version issued in 1991 from lower-resolution data. The new slides were produced from original images of 3300x2200 pixels, so resolution is excellent. The original data points were spaced every two minutes of latitude and longitude; the images represent a reduced resolution of about five minutes while preserving all important physiographic features.

For more information, and for a preview of the slides, see: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/fliers/00mgg04.html