Introduction
This paper demonstrates the capabilities of Google Earth (earth.google.com) in communicating multi-faceted information pertaining to the sequential emplacement, during approximately a 40 Ma time period, of late-Caledonian granites in Connemara, western Ireland. We generated a granite emplacement animation using a combination of 1:10,560 scale granite bedrock maps (Feely et al. 2006) and TIMS U-Pb single zircon and Re-Os molybdenite geochronometry data (Feely et al. 2003; Selby et al. 2004; Feely et al. 2007). The 4D visualization of the emplacement stages of the Connemara granites employs the Google Earth time-slider functionality. In addition to the granite emplacement maps, a series of geochemical maps relating to the Galway Granite are presented. This radioelement data has been digitized, georeferenced and interpolated in a GIS, and rendered in Keyhole Markup Language (KML) format for visualizing in Google Earth. Inverse-distance weighted (IDW) interpolation methods were applied to the surface spatial distribution of the radioelements K, U and Th (Feely and Madden 1986; 1987) for the production of a series of gridded raster maps. This study builds on the some of the methods of past studies (Feely and Madden 1987; Madden 1987; Feely and Madden 1988) and attempts to augment the final stage of presenting the data in a visually compelling and widely accessible format using Google Earth.