Everyday Awesomeness: Scuba dive from your armchair with Google Street View

Have you ever wished to dive the world’s most amazing reefs without having to do the travel, don the gear and get wet? Google has a solution for you. According to Google’s Street View:

Starting today, you can use Google Maps to find a sea turtle swimming among a school of fish, follow a manta ray, and experience the reef at sunset—just as I did on my first dive in the Great Barrier Reef last year. You can also find out much more about this reef via the World Wonders Project, a website that brings modern and ancient world heritage sites online.

At Apo Island, a volcanic island and marine reserve in the Philippines, you can see an ancient boulder coral, which may be several hundred years old. And in the middle of the Pacific, in Hawaii, you can join snorkelers in Oahu’s Hanauma Bay and drift over the vast coral reef at Maui’s Molokini crater.

We’re partnering with The Catlin Seaview Survey, a major scientific study of the world’s reefs, to make these amazing images available to millions of people through the Street View feature of Google Maps. The Catlin Seaview Survey used a specially designed underwater camera, the SVII, to capture these photos.

Whether you’re a marine biologist, an avid scuba diver or a landlocked landlubber, we encourage you to dive in and explore the ocean with Google Maps.

Here’s a short, one minute video intro:

This is great for those of us who are unlikely to get to such exotic locales and it could also be an excellent resource for educational purposes. What do you think?