Some people can read mountains of text and understand a thing perfectly. Not me. I’m a visual person. Which is why I love all the awesome images and animations being created in Google Earth. Now we can see exactly where the ice is melting, where pollutant-spewing factories are located, and which parts of the earth are heating faster than others.

Google Earth, if you’re not familiar with it, is a tool created by the folks at everyone’s favorite search engine. It uses satellite imagery, aerial photography, and GIS information to let viewers take a virtual tour of the world from on-high. Zoom out to view the globe as a whole. Zoom in to get a bird’s eye view of the roof of your very own home.

Organizations all across the world are using the tool to create images to help people see the impacts of everything from environmental destruction to humanitarian crises. Here are some of the most interesting uses of Google Earth available today:

* See how much the earth is heating up in an interactive animation of projected temperature changes over the next 100 years, courtesy of the UK’s Met Office.

* See how many of the earth’s forests are disappearing, and where, in this visualization created by a private citizen called David Tyrese.

* See all the sources of air pollution near you. The Environmental Protection Agency has created a map that shows all cement factories, oil and gas producers, petroleum refineries, and other manufacturing facilities that emit pollutants like nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide. The sheer density of all these facilities across the United States is astounding.

* Watch the ice melt at the North Pole in a series of animations created by the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado.

Things to know:

• You can download the basic Google Earth viewer for free at the Google Earth website.
• To make images of your own, you’ll need Google Pro, which currently costs $400. But a special program offered by Google Earth Outreach (featured at last weekend’s Bioneers 2008) is making the software available for free to certain nonprofits.
• “KML” is the file name for files you view in Google Earth. (Like “.doc” for Word documents and “.xls” for Excel spreadsheets.)
• “Layer” is the term used for the Google Earth document itself, again like “document” for Word or “spreadsheet” for Excel.
• See a slew of other examples of organizations using the tool on Google Earth Outreach’s website.