ANDRE Mueller is a virtual explorer of virgin territory.
One morning, off the southwest coast of Iceland, the 25-year-old German physics student noticed a wispy line -- a wrinkle, almost -- in the elaborate patchwork of satellite imagery that makes up Google Earth.
He zoomed in for a closer look.
It was smoke.
At the end of the trail, he discovered what appeared to be three boats. He slapped a "placemark," the program's version of an explorer's flag, on the location and reported his findings on the Google Earth Community bulletin board.
"What are these three ships doing there?" wrote Mueller, using the handle earthling_andre. "And why is there so much smoke?"
His fellow office-chair detectives showered him with praise for the discovery ("Now that's an AMAZING FIND," one replied), then went to work trying to solve the mystery of the burning ship.
Google Earth is packed with things that its creators never intended. Paper maps are a cartographer's rendering of the world, whereas digital versions in Google Earth, Google Maps and Microsoft's Live Search Maps are more like sophisticated collages -- moments captured by cameras on satellites and airplanes, seamlessly blended to create a digital world.
If inspected very closely, these photos from on high sometimes reveal life going on when the shutter opened and closed: airplanes in flight, surfers off Malibu, mourners congregating in a Chicago cemetery, a Boston Red Sox game underway at Fenway Park, a cement truck overturned in San Francisco.
"These are life's moments that are unexpectedly caught from above," said Jason Lee, 30, a Bellingham, Wash., marketer. He and computer programmer Jon Coogan run Bird's Eye Tourist, a website that compiles things of interest submitted by users of a Live Search Maps feature known as bird's eye view.
What may appear as a blemish to digital mapmakers is becoming sport for virtual discoverers. The hunt is on to find and share those moments.
The Google Earth Community and independent enthusiast sites such as Google Earth Blog, Google Sightseeing and Bird's Eye Tourist serve as repositories for these finds, where people can discuss, for example, a submarine captured in a permanent state of departure from Tokyo Bay (the bow-wake characteristics and sail-to-rudder measurement suggest it is a Yushio class sub, a Google Earth Community veteran concluded).
