Conquer Mont Blanc from Your Couch with Google Street View

Mont Blanc Runner — An Alpine photographer follows extreme runner Kilian Jornet Burgada, who holds the record for fastest descent of Mont Blanc.

(Image credit: Google Street View)

It's now possible to scale the brilliant, snowcapped peaks of Mont Blanc, one of Europe's tallest mountains, from the comfort of your couch.

A new Google project lets Alpine enthusiasts see close-up, 360-degree views of Mont Blanc on any device that supports Google Street View.

The company mapped Mont Blanc, dubbed the "monarch of mountains" by poet Lord Byron, through several partnerships with renowned mountain photographers, skiers, mountaineers, climbers and runners, who gathered images of the Alp's tallest peak, Google announced Jan. 21 in a blog post.

For instance, Alpine runner Kilian Jornet Burgada — who ascended and descended Mont Blanc in only 4 hours and 57 minutes, a world record — helped with the project. So did Ueli Steck, a mountain climber who scales Mont Blanc's blocks of glacial ice (called seracs), and Patrick Gabarrou, a famous guide who leads mountaineers up Mount Blanc's snowy slopes. [13 Strangest Sights on Google Earth]

Laetitia Roux, a 14-time ski-mountaineering champion, pitched in, too, Google said.

Each athlete filmed a different part of the mountain. For instance, French climbing legend Catherine Destivellecan be seen on the 12,605-foot-tall (3,842 meters) Aiguille du Midipeak near Mont Blanc. And Candide Thovex, a filmmaker and free skier, flies through the air as he explores the mountain.

Elite guide Korra Pesce leads Google Street viewers to the top of Mont Blanc by carrying the Street View trekker up and down the Goûter Route, giving fans a first-person perspective with each step.

That view could change in the future, however, as it's unclear how Mont Blanc's ecology will shift with climate change. The mountain's glaciers are already receding as temperatures rise, and the newly captured Street View may serve as a time capsule for how the mountain looks now, Sandy Russell, Project Lead for Google's Mont Blanc Street View, wrote in the blog post.

"You can learn more about how the rising temperatures are directly affecting the mountain from legendary guide Patrick Gabarrou, who describes the glacial melt on the Mer de Glace," Russell said.

This is one of many projects Google Street View has tackled at extreme sites. Last year, Google created the first-ever vertical imagery collected of El Capitan in California's Yosemite National Park. In past years, the company has catalogued coral reefs, the base camp at Mount Everest and a float trip down Colorado's Yampa River.

Follow Laura Geggel on Twitter @LauraGeggel. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Laura is the managing editor at Live Science. She also runs the archaeology section and the Life's Little Mysteries series. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Scholastic, Popular Science and Spectrum, a site on autism research. She has won multiple awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association for her reporting at a weekly newspaper near Seattle. Laura holds a bachelor's degree in English literature and psychology from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in science writing from NYU.