Worlds largest cruise ship on the way to Fort Lauderdale, FL

[sladys]

At 0:18AM local time here in Denmark worlds largest cruise ship MS Oasis of the Seas passed the Great Belt Bridge in Denmark after it left STX Europe, Shipbuilding in Turku, Finland the day before yesterday.

It's maiden voyage from Miami should be on december 1st. 2009.

It was a tough job for the captain to bring it through the bridge. The ship is 72 m (236 ft) highh above sealevel but the bridge has 65 metres (213 ft) in high to pass. Oasis could only pass the bridge because it can lower the exhausts but that wasn't enough too, so the ship had to wait until it was lowest tide in the Great Belt and the captain had to speed up to maximum speed, 22.6 knots (41.9 km/h; 26.0 mph)to make it. Because of the max speed shiped was pulled further down into the water. And it was only inches left between ship and bridge.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/Oasis_of_the_Seas%2C_October_30_2009.jpg/800px-Oasis_of_the_Seas%2C_October_30_2009.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Oasis_of_the_Seas

Video of the passage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc3hnAKeKOc

[Munden]

I was reading about that ship earlier. Quite a monster! I'd not read about the problems getting under the bridge though.

Although it's not visible in GE yet, it is visible in the Bing maps, both in top-down and their Bird's Eye View. I imagine that Finland is up for a GE Spot update at the very least soon, given they've got most every other country in the area updated to that level.

[Mickey]

This make make for a good story on Google Earth Blog, for a day when there's not any exciting news to report.

Would you be able to make the KMZ a bit more detailed? Maybe show the route the ship is taking or something? If I'm going to put it on there, I need quite a good Google Earth spin to it. The story itself is pretty cool (especially with the bridge), but a bit more in the KMZ would be ideal.

[sladys]

OK, I have uploaded a new kmz with a route from Turku to Fort Lauderdale with the phoro whe the ship is gouing to pass through. I hope this is OK. :)

[Mickey]

Great work! This will likely be posted on GEB tomorrow, which should get your file a lot of attention. :)

If you (or anyone else) has some neat content that would be good for the blog, let me know. Much of my posting over there has to do with news and data releases, but cool Google Earth content is always fun to talk about. Please let me know if you come across anything else that you think would be worth posting.

Thanks!