DURHAM, N.C. – When Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, unveiled Ocean in Google Earth, the latest evolution of the popular virtual mapping software, today in San Francisco, he was joined by a veritable who’s who of environmental news makers.

Vice President Al Gore was there. So were Sylvia Earle, explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society; Greg Farrington, executive director of the California Academy of Sciences, and musician and environmentalist Jimmy Buffet.

Standing beside them was Pat Halpin, a 91 scientist whose expertise in marine geospatial ecology played a key role in making Ocean in Google Earth possible.

Halpin is director of the Marine Geospatial Ecology Laboratory at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. He’s one of the world’s leading authorities on using geospatial technologies to map the world’s oceans and marine life.

Ocean in Google Earth, online at , uses images obtained from satellite imagery, undersea photography, and Global Information System 3-D globe technology to enable users to “dive” beneath the surface of the sea and explore the ecosystems, species and geologic features found there.

For the past year, Halpin has served on Google’s advisory council as a representative of the Census of Marine Life, a network of researchers in more than 80 nations engaged in a 10-year scientific initiative to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the oceans. They will release the world’s first comprehensive census of marine life – past, present and future – in 2010.

Halpin oversaw the incorporation of images, geospatial data, maps, videos and narratives from the group’s explorations over the past eight years into 129 “virtual expeditions” that are accessible to the public through a special Census layer of Ocean in Google Earth.

“In eight years of expeditions to remote and unexplored places in the ocean, Census scientists have found new life on nearly every trip,” he says. “The virtual journeys in the Census layer of Ocean in Google Earth give users glimpses of interesting new life forms from some of the most isolated places on the planet, along with stories of the scientists who set out to discover what lives below the surface.”

Navigating the Census’ layer in Ocean in Google Earth brings users face to face with some of the sea’s most amazing, but little known, creatures, including 50 species of Arctic jellyfish, a colossal sea star, and Antarctica’s biggest amphipod. Web users can also follow along as census scientists explore sites such as the hottest hydrothermal vent ever discovered, or a new ocean environment created by an ice shelf break the size of the island of Jamaica.

“There’s an old expression: Out of sight, out of mind. We don’t want that to happen to these amazing animals and places,” Halpin says. “By sharing these journeys through Ocean in Google Earth, we hope to provide a resource for scientists and students worldwide, and increase public awareness and appreciation of the need to explore and protect the hidden world beneath the ocean’s waves.

“This is just the beginning of what should be an expanding amount of content loaded onto Ocean in Google Earth from our group,” he notes.

91 Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab staff members Ei Fujioka and Ben Donnelly serve with Halpin on the Census’s Mapping and Visualization Team. They worked closely with Census Education and Outreach team members Sara Hickox, Darlene Crist and Jay Harding of the University of Rhode Island to collect and prepare the Google content.