A harebrained scheme to flood deserts, create ecosystems out of dead zones, sequester carbon, and create new economically productive geographies — through “seaflooding”. Take places like the Dead Sea, which is already well below sea level, and fill it up by pipelining in water from the Med or the Red Sea.
All of this would create a much bigger sea where algae could grow, fish could feed on the algae, and birds could feed on the fish. Plants would grow on the shoreline with the added moisture, and more animals would come… It would transform a desert into a new...
This is a fascinating video on the Wallace Line, which separates to biogeographic regions:
The wildlife on each side differ tremendously from one another, even the line cuts through straits that aren’t wide at all.
Naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (a contemporary of Darwin), noticed the distinction and defined the line. But what we now know is that he discovered the effects of plate tectonics decades before the theory was formalized.
So it’s not that different species mysteriously won’t cross the line — it’s that the separated landmasses with...
This image from Landsat 8 shows the western end of the English Channel off the coast of Cornwall. A phytoplankton bloom spreads for dozens of miles, filling the St. Austell Bay.
The only time I was on the Channel was on the ferry from Dover to Calais, on a particularly rough but clear day.
The river’s floodplain looks amazing from the air, a 10+ mile wide swath with dozens of smaller streams formed as the main course has meandered all over and stranded oxbows and dropped bands of sediment.
Bryan put together this neat little utility for merging point data with containing polygon attributes with spatial join queries. It uses Turf.js to do the geoprocess in the browser.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has captured its highest-resolution panorama yet of the Martian surface. Composed of more than 1,000 images taken during the 2019 Thanksgiving holiday and carefully assembled over the ensuing months, the composite contains 1.8 billion pixels of Martian landscape. The rover’s...
Lake Chad spans 4 national borders in the central Sahel: Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon. Since the 1960s it’s shrunk to about 5% its ancestral size, due to overuse, mismanagement, and climate shifts.
This NASA photo uses SRTM data combined with Landsat 8 to highlight the edges of the basin that was once the size of the Caspian Sea:
About 7,000 years ago, a vast lake spread hundreds of square kilometers across north-central Africa. Known to scientists as Lake Mega Chad, it...
Combining baseball and maps? Sign me up. The MLB has a plan to “improve” the MiLB system costs, standards, compensation, and other things through shuttering 42 ball clubs around the country. In this piece for FanGraphs, the authors use some GIS tactics to analyze how this shakes out for baseball fans falling within those markets:
So how many Americans would see their ability to watch affiliated baseball in person disappear under MLB’s proposal? And how many would see their primary point of access shift from the...
In preparation for this year’s Geography 2050 theme (“borders in a borderless world”), this map gives a helpful sense of how relatively young most of the world’s international boundaries are. Outside of Europe, most boundaries are shades of red or blue (dating from 1800 or later).
I’m an airplane window seat guy. So when on a flight with good views, I end up gazing out the window for most of the time and capturing my own aerial imagery.
Our Monday flight from Fort Lauderdale to San Juan took us over the Bahamas, so I got some nice scenery to look at during the trip. The first batch was over the centerline of the Bahamian chain, next over Turks and Caicos, then a gap of ocean north of Hispaniola until reaching Puerto Rico.
Here are some of the best shots, with captions for reference.
I first saw this through Google’s Earth View a few months back. It’s a coastal area of the Kimberly Region in Western Australia.
Bands of low-lying mountain ranges run from southeast to northwest, jutting out into the Timor Sea. The striated bands of folded rock formations create low-elevation channels, and where these meet the ocean you get fjord-like features slicing into the coastline. It reminds me of The Vale from the map of Westeros.
Along the coast you get features like the Horizontal Falls: a...
Our friends over at the American Geographical Society have spearheaded a new competition (in partnership with the Omidyar Network) called EthicalGEO to seek out new ideas on how the community can better understand the ethical challenges with geospatial data, privacy, sharing, and the like, and find solutions and systems to embrace what’s new and combat the risks and downsides:
The EthicalGEO initiative seeks to activate thinkers, innovators, entrepreneurs, policymakers, practitioners, students, and everyday citizens and bring them in to a global dialog that shines a light on their best ideas about the...
This striking image shows sediment flow from the Kolyma, a 1,300 mile braided river that originates in the mountains of Eastern Siberia.
For about eight months of the year, the Kolyma River is frozen to depths of several meters. But every June, the river thaws and carries vast amounts of suspended sediment and organic material into the Arctic Ocean. That surge of fresh, soil-ridden waters colors the Kolyma Gulf (Kolymskiy Zaliv) dark brown and black.
Most people don’t know how earth imaging satellites work. All they know is a camera is flying overhead snapping photos. This visualization gives you an animated picture of how Planet’s satellite constellation can cover the entire globe every day for a continuously-updated view of the Earth:
In four years, Planet has flown on 18 successful launches and deployed 293 satellites successfully into low Earth orbit. With more than 150 satellites currently in orbit, Planet has the largest constellation of Earth imaging satellites in history.
Amazing that we’ve got this kind of capability with microsatellite technology....
On this edition of Places is the Mergui Archipelago, a string of coastal islands off of southern Myanmar in the Andaman Sea.
I saw this image a few years back on NASA’s Earth Observatory feed. It’s an amazing snapshot from Landsat 5 that shows gorgeous colors from the silts and sediments emptied at the mouth of the Lenya River. The tidal motions make the colored sea water smear across the image like an oil painting. I also love the dendritic patterns of the streams and tributaries on the islands. They give...
The mountain stages of the Tour de France are some of my favorite events in sports. This edition of Places features a tribute to this year’s 18th stage, and one of my favorite climbs of the Alps: the Col du Galibier, a 2,600m HC beast with an epic descent on the other side.
Galibier was last climbed in the 2017 Tour, during an awesome Stage 17 when Primož Roglič won the day on a route that included famous...
While it’s a big body of water when you pan over it on the map, it’s size is hard to fathom when compared to other geographic features:
If you are traveling on Canada’s Great Slave Lake, you will notice one characteristic right away: it is enormous. Roughly the size of Belgium, it ranks in the top fifteen largest lakes worldwide....
Only geography nerds have NASA’s Earth Observatory feed set up in their RSS reader. On there a team from NASA share interesting images from around the world as they come in from the various earth observation satellite sensors in orbit.
I check out items as they come through the feed and will occasionally download my favorites to edit into wallpapers for my laptop or phone. One of the best ever that’s been the wallpaper-of-choice on my machine for the past year is this great shot of Tanzania’s Lake Natron:
I browse maps all the time, panning around in Google Earth whenever I want to look something up, favoriting things along the way. I thought I’d start documenting some of those here.
The Richat Structure is a circular geologic dome formation in the Mauritanian Sahara. I actually saw this when I was panning around the desert looking at the striated mountains you can see going from east to west toward the Atlantic. The whole structure is about 20 miles in diameter, and looks completely alien and out of place in the desert.
“It may seem surprising but, in terms of digital media storage, our knowledge of language almost fits compactly on a floppy disk,” the authors wrote in the study. In this case, that would be a floppy disk that holds about 1.5 megabytes of information, or the equivalent of about a minute-long song as an Mp3 file. [3D Images: Exploring the Human Brain] The researchers estimate that in the best-case scenario, in a...
I love this piece — a detailed analysis, backstory, and new map of Odysseus’s supposed voyages around the Mediterranean:
In 1597 the cartographer Abraham Ortelius became the first person to draw a map of Odysseus’ travels. Like many Homeric geographers, Ortelius identifies Scheria, home of the Phaeacians, with Corcyra (now known as Corfu) because of a passage from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War claiming the Phaeacians were the previous inhabitants of that island. While widely accepted, this identification of Scheria with Corcyra creates a problem. Homer clearly places Calypso’s island west of Scheria, but there is no island in...
Mapbox has built this curated dataset of administrative boundaries from country level down to local geographic units like arrondissements, prefectures, and districts. Knowing how difficult it is to aggregate and clean up all this different datasources into a single cohesive product, this is an impressive dataset that they’re providing through their developer tools for geocoding and joining to other data. Browse the dataset on this interactive map.
One of the highlights of the west → east flight from Northern California is the chance to get views over the ranges of California, Nevada, and Colorado. The first leg of my flight home this week took me from San Jose to Denver, offering up those snow-capped mountains I so rarely get to see living in the southeast.
Not too far into the flight you come upon the Sierra Nevada, if you’re lucky passing right over the Yosemite Valley. Today there was a thin, low cloud layer over the mountains, so the view...
This was a cool idea from cartographer Daniel Huffman. He live-streamed a walkthrough taking apart one of his map projects in Illustrator to see how he puts it all together.
I love this idea and am excited to see him do more like this down the road.
I don’t remember what got me to it, but the other day I found this short documetary video about Southern California’s Salton Sea, a saline lake about 80 miles inland from San Diego:
I knew about its infamy as a failed resort destination, with planned developments like Desert Shores and Salton City that popped up on its edge in the 1950s. What I didn’t know was the sea’s history as the result of an engineering accident, induced by the California Development Company trying to divert...
I picked up John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country this week. You could think of it like a biography of Alaska: the region pre- and post-statehood, its people, the wilderness, wildlife, and its vastness.
Woven throughout are reminders of just how massive the untouched wilderness is in Alaska, and how far you really are from civilization out in the flatlands or up in the Brooks Range.
Early in the book he and his companions are traveling up the Salmon River, in the Kobuk Valley National Park (still not designated in 1977 at the time of...
The last several months I’ve been spending quite a bit of time working on this: our geospatial data and analytical product line called Foresight. We’ve been in this business dating back to 2000 in various forms and using the technologies of the era, but empowered by today’s technology, decision support tools, and the open source geo stack, it’s evolved to something novel and unmatched for our customers.
At its core it’s “data-as-a-service” designed to give customers the insights they need to do more, spend less, decide faster, and reduce their uncertainty, with a focus on international geospatial markets.
Mesmerizing, hypnotic video shot in 8K pointed straight down from an airplane. It looks like these were originally shot for Apple to use as their “Aerial” screensaver seen on Apple TV.
I could leave this on a loop in my office all day.
In the spirit of yesterday’s post on the Earth of the past, this interactive map lets you browse back in time to see what oceans and landmasses looked like all the way back to 750 million years ago. Try typing in your address to see if you’d have been a resident of Gondwana or Laurasia if you took your time machine back to the Triassic.
When I read Annals of the Former World some years back, the hardest thing to wrap my head around with geologic...
Every year since the pre-Stone Age area, visualized as a time lapse on a map.
This is amazing and puts into context what was developing where over time. I know when I read the history of one culture, like Ancient Greece, it’s hard to keep in the mind what was happening elsewhere in the world during the same time period. This video could be a good reference point to pull up to get a sense of what happened during, before, and after any...
The UCI World Tour season kicks off this week with the Tour Down Under.
I started following pro cycling closely about 5 years ago, but since it’s fairly hard to get access to on broadcasts, I only get to watch a handful of events each year. With the NBC Cycling Pass you get some big events, like the Tour de France and Vuelta a España, plus some other fun ones in the spring like Paris-Roubaix, Paris-Nice, and Liège-Bastogne-Liège.
Last season while watching the Criterium du Dauphiné, it dawned on me one of the reasons I got...
My colleagues Bill Dollins and Todd Pollard (the core of our data team), wrote this post detailing how we go from original ground-based data collection in Fulcrum through a data processing pipeline to deliver product to customers. A combination of PostGIS, Python tools, FME, Amazon RDS, and other custom QA tools get us from raw content to finished, analyst-ready GEOINT products.
Khan Academy’s Andy Matuschak on tasks that require “depth of knowledge” versus those that have higher “transfer demand.” Both can be considered “difficult” in a sense, but teaching techniques to build knowledge need different approaches:
One big implication of mastery learning is that students should have as much opportunity to practice a skill as they’d like. Unlike a class that moves at a fixed pace, a struggling student should always be able to revisit prerequisites, read an alternative explanation, and try some new challenges. These systems...
I’m working on a special side project right now, getting myself back into cartography a bit. The last time I did any serious cartography work was with TileMill, probably 4 or 5 years ago. This time I’m trying my hand with QGIS to see what I can do.
For part of this project I wanted topographic maps, for both data and design inspiration. I was reminded of this excellent tool for browsing and downloading the archive of historical topo maps from the USGS. I have no idea why this isn’t the primary interface for the National Map, but I’m glad...
Borders in today’s world are remarkably static, ever-present lines we all get used to separating territories as if there are hard barriers to interaction between the multicolored countries of your average political map of the world. Centuries of perpetual war, invasions, treaties, intermarrying monarchs, imperialism, and revolutions redrew the global map with regularity, but today we don’t see this level of volatility. When a new country is formed, a disputed territory shifts, or a country is renamed, it makes global headlines. It’s only every few years that you see territorial shifts.
I was curious, so I went and tracked down each one on Google Earth. And because I’m a nerd, here’s a geojson file with all of them so you can quickly find and marvel at their remoteness.
Part of Vox’s Borders video series. Hong Kong is such a fascinating and unique place, as is today’s China, though for massively different reasons. How China treats HK will be one of the indicators of the wider Chinese plan for free market economics and political openness.
This is the first book review post since I put up my library section. I hope to do more of this in the future with each new book I add to the collection. Enjoy.
The Story of Maps took me a while to get through, but it’s the most comprehensive history I’ve seen on the history of geography and cartography.
Of particular note was the history of the figures in antiquity, their discoveries, and the techniques they used to advance the science of mapmaking. From Strabo, Eratosthenes, and Ptolemy to Ortelius, Mercator, and Huygens, Brown is extremely...
I swung through an Apple Store a couple of weeks ago to check out the new hardware. The Smart Keyboard Folio has been hard to imagine the experience with in reviews without handling one. Same with the Pencil. I was particularly impressed with the magnetic hold of the Pencil on the side of the device — it’s darn strong. The current Smart Keyboard has some deficiencies, as pointed out in this article. No instant access to Siri or at least Siri Dictation, no system shortcut keys...
We’re heading up next month to the American Geographical Society’s Geography2050 again this year, which will be my 4th one, and the 5th annual overall. It’s always a great event — a diverse crowd in attendance and a chance to catch up with a lot of old friends.
The last two years the AGS has hosted and led an OpenStreetMap mapathon in conjunction with the event to promote OSM as a tool in education. It’s organized and led by TeachOSM, and they invite 50+ AP Geography teachers from around the country to learn how to...
Alan Feuer drives one of the continent’s most isolated roads over Alaska’s Brooks Range, from Livengood (population: 13) to the industrial oil camp of Deadhorse:
It was with these thoughts that I finally got to Deadhorse, which may rank as the most horrific place on planet Earth. If Stalin had built a gulag in the cargo area of Kennedy Airport, it would probably look like Deadhorse. The town, if you can call it that, is the apotheosis of petrochemical dismalness: a wasteland of oil tanks, acetylene fires, heavy-machine repair shops and spill-abatement companies that is drenched in freezing...
Robert Draper spent time traveling the Congo River on barges that function as mobile cities to the hundreds of small remote villages along its shores.
Dawn hasn’t yet broken, but already coal fires are burning and women are frying beignets. Other passengers have risen from their foam mattresses and begun to lay out their wares for sale: soap, batteries, herbal potions, shoes, rancid whiskey. Soon visitors from deep in the bush will paddle up in their pirogues and hoist themselves spiderlike aboard the barges, bearing their own products to barter: bananas, catfish, carp, boas, baboons, ducks, crocodiles. The...
Yesterday I read this fascinating piece on the state of Louisiana’s gulf coast. This slow, man-induced terraforming of the coastline is permanently eradicating bayou communities, and becoming a high-profile issue in the state. One of the author’s contentions is that the misrepresentation of the state’s ever-changing shape on official maps is a contributor to the lack of attention paid to this drastic situation. I love this use of correct maps as an amplifier of focus, to clarify what bad maps are hiding from the general population.
This issue of map miscommunication isn’t isolated to crises like the one happening...
A drilling accident in 1971 in Turkmenistan’s Karakum Desert created this 70 meter-wide crater, when a Soviet rig hit a cavernous pocket of natural gas.
The landmark, dubbed the “Door to Hell” by the locals has been continuously burning since, fueled by subterranean gas deposits. It’s now a local tourist attraction:
“Small roadside teahouses, known as chaikhanas, offer food and accommodation, with many also selling petrol and other supplies. Local families – who mostly eke out a living shepherding flocks in the area, and have yurts positioned close to the roads – also take in guests, and...
I presented the day-two keynote to the CFGIS Workshop, talking about what the future of the geography and GIS discipline holds — new technologies for collaboration and sharing, the growth of the geo community and why it matters, and the importance of foundational knowledge of geography to our young people entering higher education.
I’ve been reading a lot lately about sociocultural geography — about how people interact with their environments and with one another across space and time. This topic is more relevant than ever with today’s borderless conflicts, asymmetric warfare, and technology behind the scenes leveling the playing field for groups at all levels. On a journey across the internet reading and watching various things about human geography, I stumbled upon this fantastic piece by Adam Curtis on his BBC blog.
It tells the story and background of counterinsurgency doctrine from its inception in revolutionary communist China and Indochina to...
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