Eartha

Alternate name of the Norse Goddess Nerthus, the Goddess of the Earth and fertility. She is the sister of Njord, and bore him Frey and Freyja. She is a dignified and respected Goddess who was invisible to all. She punished quarreling with death, and after being ritually drawn around her sacred island in her veiled chariot, the chariot was cleansed of impurities in the sea, and all who had taken part in the offering were drowned.

Her colour is dark green, and her tree is the Birch. The Empress card in Tarot applies to her, and Virgo is her natural sign. Her rune is Berkana.

At 45 feet 1.5 inches in diameter, Eartha is credited by the Guinness Book of World Records as the "World's Largest Revolving/Rotating Globe," and will likely take the title of largest globe when it supersedes the "Globe of Peace" in Apecchi, Italy, which measures 33 feet in diameter.

Designed by David DeLorme, namesake (and CEO) of the DeLorme tech company, Eartha is located on the DeLorme campus in Yarmouth, Maine. Designed completely digitally, it is the composite of multiple sources including satellite data, detailed bathymetry, and urban maps. The DeLorme website claims that the data is equivalent to approximately 140 gigabytes, making it the largest composite image of the Earth ever assembled.

The globe itself is at a 1:1,000,000 scale, which works out to about an inch per sixteen miles. It is tilted properly at 23.5 degrees, and moves under the power of two specially designed computer-controlled motors at a maximum speed of one rotation every minute. The skin of the globe is comprised of 792 sections each spanning a distance of 8° latitude by 10° longitude. These are mounted on and supported by DeLorme's proprietary "Omni-Span™ Truss structure," i.e. over 6,000 pieces of aluminium tubing.

Interesting Facts on the Eartha website:

• "When Eartha rotates, 100 CD-ROMs worth of data a minute pass by. If you consider that the average person in the world reads one CD-ROM worth of text in their lifetime, that means that almost 100 lifetimes of data pass before your eyes while watching Eartha."
• Eartha’s Circumference: 130.91 feet
• Eartha's Surface Area: 5310.57 square feet

_{More Info:
http://www.delorme.com/companyinfo/eartha.htm
Image:
http://www.delorme.com/companyinfo/images/eartha_inside.jpg}