Chocolate Chip Starfish!! Web Reference

Relative sizes of the spheres of water on Earth. This image shows all of Earth's liquid water using three orbs of proportional sizes. The big sphere is all liquid water in the world, 97% of which is seawater. The next smallest sphere represents a subset of the larger sphere, showing freshwater in the ground, lakes, swamps, and rivers. The tiny speck below it represents an even smaller subset of all the water—just the freshwater in lakes and rivers.

Dubai's artificial islands: Palm Jumeirah and The World. These artificial islands, which jut audaciously into the Persian Gulf off Dubai, United Arab Emirates, were created specifically for coastal housing tracts and commercial build­ ings and resemble the shape of a palm tree and a globe of the world as seen from space. Even though the islands have doubled Dubai's shoreline, they have disrupted the region's coastal ecosystem. Palm Jumeirah is about 10 kilometers (6 miles) wide. Photo taken by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station in 2010.

The peopling of the Pacific islands. The major island groups of the Pacific Ocean are Micronesia (brown shading), Melanesia (peach shading), and Polynesia (green shading). The "Lapita people" present in New Ireland 5000-­4000 B.C. can be traced to Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa by 1100 B.C. (yellow arrow). Green arrows show the peopling of distant islands throughout Polynesia. The route of Thor Heyerdahl's balsa raft Kon Tiki is also shown (red arrow).

Where am I ???

Using a handheld sextant. This sextant is similar to the ones used by early navigators to determine latitude. The angle that the Pole Star (in our hemisphere Polaris!) is above.

Polaris

John Harrison and his chronometer H-4. Painting (circa 1735) of John Harrison holding his chronometer H-4, which was his life's work. The timepiece H-4 proved to be a vital technological breakthrough that allowed the determina­tion of longitude at sea and won Harrison a substantial prize for solving the longitude problem.

Voyages of Columbus and Magellan. Map show­ing the dates and routes of Columbus's first voyage and the first circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan's party.

Captain James Cook ( ) and his voyages of exploration. Routes taken by Captain James Cook on his three scientific voyages, which initiated scientific explo­ration of the oceans. Cook was killed in 1779 in Hawaii during his third voyage.