Google Earth crashes constantly

Google Earth will work for a minute or so, then crash back to the desktop, always when zooming in. It has about a 95% failure rate. I've tried different video drivers...proprietary and not...no help. After it crashes a few times, it will note that it has crashed and suggest things that might help... clearing the cache, turning off the atmosphere, etc. None of that helps. Google Earth worked perfectly and NEVER crashed when I was running Windows 7 on the exact same hardware a couple of months ago. I'll admit that the video card is ancient (NVIDIA GTX-275), but again, it just loved that card on Windows 7. Maybe I should have kept a dual boot system. Oh well. Any thoughts?

It would be useful to execute Google Earth from a terminal in debug mode, if it exists, if not, simply look at the output on the terminal when it crashes.

Anyways, have you been able to solve this problem with newer Ubuntu Mate and newer Google Earth?