The karsting limestone of Mount Api , Malaysia.
If you go back to the Permian, youâd find the Appalachians, Massif Central, Atlas Mountains, and Scottish Highlands were all part of a single range cutting through the Pangean supercontinent.
A harebrained scheme to flood deserts, create ecosystems out of dead zones, sequester carbon, and create new economically productive geographies â through âseafloodingâ. 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 Mediterranean.
This, of course, would not just create a thriving biological environment. It would create amazing economic opportunities for more agriculture and more tourism. These would justify more infrastructure, which would further increase the wealth of the area.
Iâm a pretty big skeptic about terraforming as a realistic endeavor. Not only on grounds of costs or feasibility, but on the fear of tampering with pre-existing natural systems. The Ian Malcolm in me is hesitant to confuse feasibility and viability. Just because itâs plausible, doesnât mean a) it will work or b) it wonât have even worse second-order effects. Itâs well worth the debate and thought experiment, though!
From John McPheeâs Annals of the Former World:
Geologists on the whole are inconsistent drivers. When a roadcut presents itself, they tend to lurch and weave. To them, the roadcut is a portal, a fragment of a regional story, a proscenium arch that leads their imaginations into the earth and through the surrounding terrane.
This is a book Iâd love to revisit. So many great bits of history.
I just finished Robert Macfarlaneâs Underland, a book about all things âunderworldâ â catacombs, cave exploration, underground rivers, tree root networks, and geologic time. He ties these stories together with historical backgrounds of each place, globetrotting from the Slovenian Dolomites to Greenland to Norwegian ocean caves. Itâs an excellent read. Highly recommended if you like nature writing and narrative nonfiction!
In the final chapter he visits the west coast of Finland, specifically the Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository, a 500m deep network of man-made caves designed to house up to 6,500 tons of spent nuclear fuel rods for 100,000 years. Here and at other locations like Yucca Mountain, mankind is inserting its own strata into the geologic record. The author describes the lengths the architects go to to protect future generations from the lethal material buried within. To reach the deadly uranium cache, youâd bore through layers and layers â granite, gneiss, bentonite, copper, iron, zirconium. Layers of protective housings to keep in the radioactive waste.
But the strangest aspect of the story involves a collection of Finnish folklore called the Kalevala:
The Kalevala is a long poem of many voices and many stories which â like the Iliad and the Odyssey â grows out of diverse and deep-rooted traditions, from Baltic song to Russian storytelling. It existed chiefly as a mutable oral text for more than a thousand years, until in the nineteenth century the Kalevala was collected, edited and published by the Finnish scholar Elias LĂśnnrot, giving us the mostly fixed version we now have.
Thereâs a story in the Kalevala about a hero called VäinämĂśinen, who has an underground encounter eerily related to whatâs happening today at Onkalo:
Partway through the poem, VäinämĂśinen is given the task of descending to the underland. Hidden in the Finnish forests, he is told, is the entrance to a tunnel that leads to a cavern far underground. In that cavern are stored materials of huge energy: spells and enchantments which, when spoken, will release great power. To approach this subterranean space safely VäinämĂśinen must protect himself with shoes of copper and a shirt of iron, lest he be damaged by what it contains. Ilmarinen forges them for him. Clad in these insulating metals VäinämĂśinen approaches the tunnel mouth, which is disguised by aspens, alders, willows and spruce. He cuts down the trees to reveal the entrance. He enters the tunnel and finds himself in a deep âgraveâ, a âdemon lairâ. He has stepped, he realizes, into the throat of a buried giant called Vipunen whose body is the land itself.
Vipunen warns VäinämĂśinen not to bring to the surface what is buried in his caverns. He speaks of the âgrievous painâ of excavation. Why have you entered âmy guiltless heart, my blameless bellyâ, Vipunen asks, âto eat and to gnaw / to bite, to devourâ? He warns VäinämĂśinen that he will end up visiting terrible violence upon humans if he continues on his course, that he will become âa windborne disease / wind-borne, water driven / shared out by the gale / carried by chill airâ. He threatens to imprison VäinämĂśinen by means of a containment spell so powerful that it is unlikely ever to be broken.
How does a centuries-old Finnish myth sound like it presages something dangerous buried underground in the 21st century? Thereâs even reference to copper as protection, and carrying a âwindborne disease.â Ancient myths contain more practical knowledge than we think. Itâs no wonder theories abound about aliens visiting earth in the past, or about advanced civilizations being around 50,000 years ago.
From the world of geophysics, a massive-scale seismic research project has been happening surrounding the island of RĂŠunion, a shield volcanic dome over an Indian Ocean hotspot. Researchers have been using a stream of data collected from a web of seismometers in the region to map out the superheated plumes of mantle material that bubble up from the core.
In 2012, a team of geophysicists and seismologists set out to map the plume, deploying a giant network of seismometers across the vast depths of the Indian Ocean seafloor. Nearly a decade later, the team has revealed that the mantle is stranger than expected. The team reported in June in Nature Geoscience that the plume isnât a simple column. Instead, a titanic mantle plume âtreeâ rises from the fringes of the planetâs molten heart, with superheated branchlike structures appearing to grow diagonally out of it. As these branches approach the crust, they seem to sprout smaller, vertically rising branches â super hot plumes that underlie known volcanic hot spots at the surface.
The data has resulted in higher-resolution 3D modeling of these plumes than weâve seen before, showing how fractal, tree-like structures happen even in geophysical processes embedded in the earth. These patterns are everywhere in nature, even in slow-moving rock. The article comes with some cool graphics showing what these structures look like, stretching from the core up to the surface forming continent-sized columns.
Geologic timescales are impossible to comprehend in their scale. So I love it when writers accelerate the events for effect:
Some scientists suspect that plumes from the African giant blob spent at least 120 million years tearing the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana into shards. As the plumes rose into its base, they heated it and weakened it; like moles making hills, they caused the land atop these plumes to dome upward, then slide downhill. Australia was unzipped from India and Antarctica, Madagascar from Africa, and the Seychelles microcontinent from India â an act of destruction that made the Indian Ocean.
Lake Chad spans 4 national borders in the central Sahel: Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon. Since the 1960s itâs 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 covered more than 400,000 square kilometers (150,000 square miles) at its peak, making it slightly larger than the Caspian Sea, the biggest lake on Earth today.
Modern Lake Chad has shrunk to just a fraction of its former size, but evidence of the lakeâs ancient shorelines is still etched into desert landscapes â hundreds of kilometers from the shores of the modern lake.
If you look at the Lake today on Google Earth, youâll see some amazing landforms where the Saharan dunes transition to swampland on the shores of the basin. Thereâs some incredibly high-resolution data in that region:
Lake Chad :: 13°0' N, 14°30' E
This is a great breakdown of the different elements of LiDAR technology, looking at three broad areas: beam direction, distance measurement, and frequencies. They compare the tech of 10 different companies in the space to see how each is approaching the problem.
Taking off of the Wikibooks project, this team is aiming to generate books from Wikipedia content using ML techniques.
Given the advances in artificial intelligence in recent years, is there a way to automatically edit Wikipedia content so as to create a coherent whole that is useful as a textbook? Enter Shahar Admati and colleagues at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. These guys have developed a way to automatically generate Wikibooks using machine learning. They call their machine the Wikibook-bot. âThe novelty of our technique is that it is aimed at generating an entire Wikibook, without human involvement,â they say.
This simple app lets you slide from the Jurassic to the Holocene. A vivid demonstration of how long 200 million years really is.
In the spirit of yesterdayâs 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 youâd 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 time was the sheer scale of what â100 million yearsâ looks like. No matter how many of the comparisons, scale bars, or timelines I see, itâs still mind-blowing to think about continents converging, separating, and reconverging repeatedly throughout history.
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.
The 518 coordinated flights operation, by 16 Northern California emergency responder agencies, is one of the biggest drone response to a disaster scene in the nationâs history. The 16 UAV teams were led by Alameda County Sheriffâs Office. Stockton Police, Contra Cost County Sheriffâs Office & Menlo Park Fire Protection District had the most team members present, with Union City Police, Hayward Police and Stanislaus County Sheriffâs Office providing units as well. San Francisco Police oversaw airspace mitigation. In addition to the mapping flights, over 160 full 360-degrees and interactive panoramas were created with the help of Hangar, as well as geo-referenced video was shot along major roads in Paradise through Survae.
An impressive effort by response agencies in California to respond to this tragic disaster and assess the damage.
An article on the Great Unconformity in the geologic record and its potential cause:
The Grand Canyon is a gigantic geological library, with rocky layers that tell much of the story of Earthâs history. Curiously though, a sizeable layer representing anywhere from 250 million years to 1.2 billion years is missing.
The likely culprit was a theoretical planetwide glaciated period known as the âSnowball Earthâ.
I majored in geography in college and always liked earth sciences. I dabbled a bit with classes that were related, but not core to geography study â your basic geology courses and a class in geodesy. One of the classes I took called âGeology of the National Parksâ had an applied approach to explaining the foundations of geology. Something about hopping from Katmai to Yosemite to the Everglades made me see geology as more than rocks and minerals. I loved the massive scope and scale of the Earthâs 4.5 billion years. Normally anything with a magnitude starting with a B or T is intangible (distances in deep space) or minuscule (numbers of molecules in a human body). But when talking about rocks, rivers, continents, strata, sediments â these things are very tangible and static, at least in passive observation. A year is a long time at the human scale, but a blink on the geologic. When comparing human and geologic timelines, it takes a while for this to sink in.
Iâve never read anything on the subject of geology. I previously enjoyed John McPheeâs The Control of Nature, and had Annals of the Former World on my reading list after browsing some of his other work. Itâs a tome, but I decided to download it on my Kindle and give it a shot.
The book is a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of 4 books independently researched, written, and published over the course of 20 years starting in the late 1970s. Itâs an incredible piece of nonfiction writing, with just the right balance of well-researched science, facts and figures, storytelling, and narrative1. The author tells a geologic history of the North American continent by way of the I-80 corridor across the lower 48 from New York to San Francisco, studying roadcuts and outcrops along the way. Each piece paints a picture of a slice of geologic science, with an emphasis on different landforms and processes. McPhee does an excellent job exposing the deep vocabulary of the geologist without being overwhelmingly technical. Heâs traveling with (and quoting) scientists, and the book pushes 700 pages, so thereâs no need for brevity.
In each section he splices together a healthy dose of history with scientific explanations of geologic processes. Each part contains a historical timeline of notable events, discoveries, or personalities that made breakthroughs in the science. Some of my favorite bits included foundations of what we know about Earthâs dynamism today, and the battles fought to get there in the scientific discoveries of the 18th and 19th centuries.
By the end of the book I was just beginning to get comfortable with the order and structure of the geologic time scale. The terms are so numerous that it takes repition to remember which came first, which age is within which epoch, and so on. Precambrian, Eocene, Devonian, Permian, Pennsylvanian, Proterozoic, Hadean, Ordovician â I had to have the trusty time scale at hand for constant reference.
Basin and Range starts things off with a study of the geologic province of the same name, mostly coinciding in the US with the state of Nevada. The expanse lies between the Great Salt Lake and the Sierra Nevada, with rolling folds of hills and valleys.
This section lays the foundation for modern geology by covering the work of two pillar figures: James Hutton and Charles Lyell. Hutton was a Scot that studied in the 18th century, and is known as the âfather of modern geologyâ. As uncontroversial as rocks sound, itâs telling to keep in mind the context in which Hutton was publishing his work:
âHutton published his Theory of the Earth in 1795, when almost no one doubted the historical authenticity of Noahâs Flood, and all species on earth were thought to have been created individually, each looking at the moment of its creation almost exactly as it did in modern times.â
Making claims that the Earth was billions of years old was as blasphemous to the scientific community of the era as Darwinâs work on evolution. Huttonâs theories of uniformitarianism didnât stick in 1795. It wasnât until years later that Lyell took Huttonâs original theories and popularized them in the 1800s with his own Principles of Geology. And Darwin, by the way, was heavily influenced by the work of both geologists:
âVoyaging on the Beagle, he was enhancing his sense of the slow and repetitive cycles of the earth and the giddying depths of time, with Lyellâs book in his hand and Huttonâs theory in his head. In six thousand years, you could never grow wings on a reptile. With sixty million, however, you could have feathers, too.â
In each of the bookâs parts, McPhee is traveling with a different geologist in the field. In Basin and Range heâs following Ken Deffeyes, a specialist in the topography, mineral deposits, and stratigraphy of the region, on a mission to locate its abandoned silver mines and hunt unextracted ore using techniques not available during the 19th century mining boom. Most metal deposits have hydrothermal origins. Superheated water from deep underground melts and collects trace metals, makes its way upward through fissures in the rock, and precipitates them out in seams near the surface. As McPhee writes, âa vein of ore is the filling of a fissure. A map of former hot springs is remarkably close to a map of metal discoveries.â Iâd love to check out some mining data and compare with geologic maps.
With the primitive theories of deep time and continental movement established in part one, part two, In Suspect Terrain, takes us to the Appalachians in the east. This part focuses mostly on the mountain-building, volcanism, and erosion that created the âsuspect terrainâ of Appalachia. From geologist Anita Harris we begin to understand the processes and results of glaciation, the most ruthless of Earthâs erosive forces. When the Wisconsinan ice sheet covered the continental US all the way south to Kentucky, it left scars and remnants scattered all over the country from Indiana to New York and up into Canada. The ice pulverized rock from the Adirondacks into gravel and powder and eventually carried it toward the Atlantic, depositing it as Long Island, which is made almost entirely of glacial deposits. The spine of the island is the ice sheetâs terminal moraine, and from there to the south shore is the outwash plain. Itâs amazing how much of the country north of Tennessee is covered with topography resulting from the Ice Age glacial sheets. The pockmark lakes covering Ontario, Quebec, Minnesota, and Wisconsin are the âkame and kettleâ landscape created by the grinding ice. An interesting statistic: Canadaâs ponds, lakes, and streams hold a sixth of all fresh water on Earth.
McPhee peppers his writing with great little anecdotes that make the abstract scientific bits more real. For example: the millions of pool tables and chalkboards made from the slate of Pennsylvaniaâs Martinsburg formation metamorphosed from shale which was once silty mud on the bottom of the Ordovician ocean, 440 million years ago. Iâll definitely think of this every time I play pool from now on.
In Suspect Terrain introduces the final formation of plate tectonic theory in the 1960s. Nuclear proliferation in the 1950s had governments investing in seismic monitoring stations all over the world to feel for blast shocks. As a side effect, geologists detected and recorded earthquakes on a global scale, over the course of several years. Tossing those records on a map gives you a clear picture of the eggshell-like plates of crust, with thousands of vibrations marking the slip and slide of the plates against one another.
Part three, Rising from the Plains, takes us to the Rocky Mountains in the company of Wyoming native David Love. This part contains probably the least science, and instead substitutes some excellent tales of Loveâs upbringing on his familyâs isolated ranch in central Wyoming. In the early 20th century Wyoming was still very much the frontier, sparsely populated with little industry until the coal and uranium mining businesses boomed in the middle of the century. I love the titleâs double meaning â Love and the Rockies formations he studied both spring from the eastern Wyoming flatness. The stories of his family roots hammer home how inhospitable and disconnected the West still was at the time.
This chapter dives into the regionâs volcanic origins. With Yellowstone Park, itâs one of the most visible examples of hotspot geology in the world. Mountain building is covered in depth here, also, giving some context to how the Rockies built up, and how erosion has broken them and created the sedimentary structures of the outwash plain. The limestone layers in the high Rockies leave record of the Paleozoic ocean that once covered that part of the continent, and lifted only during the last 80 million years, which as McPhee points out is only âthe last three percent of timeâ. Tidbits like this drill home just how deep deep time is. This bit about the Grand Canyon seems almost impossible:
The Colorado River, which has only recently appeared on earth, has excavated the Grand Canyon in very little time. From its beginning, human beings could have watched the Grand Canyon being made.
The origins and primary mission of the US Geological Survey are also covered in Rising from the Plains. The USGS mapped the expanses of territory acquired during the first half of the 19th century to catalog the nationâs resources, and as a result produced some of the original map data still in use through various public sources today2.
The final installment aims to explain the origins of California and the Pacific coast, aptly titled Assembling California. The first point covered is the concept of âexotic terranesâ, landmasses that move across oceans and suture themselves onto other continental bodies through subduction faulting. The Sierra Nevada formed this way, a Japan-like archipelago riding the Pacific plate across the ocean and colliding with the Nevada shorelines in the Jurassic. With great effect once again, McPhee explains how terranes come together:
Ocean floors with an aggregate area many times the size of the present Pacific were made at spreading centers, moved around the curve of the earth, and melted in trenches before there ever was so much as a kilogram of California. Then, a piece at a timeâaccording to present theoryâparts began to assemble. An island arc here, a piece of a continent thereâa Japan at a time, a New Zealand, a Madagascarâcame crunching in upon the continent and have thus far adhered.
Faults are fractures in the crust formed around plate boundaries, and covered in depth in this chapter. Californiaâs San Andreas fault complex is a strike-slip transform fault, and one of the most well known to Americans. His story of California begins at Mussel Rock on the San Francisco peninsula, right where the San Andreas enters the Pacific.
The Smartville Block formation that makes up the bulk of California formed on the ocean floor â an ophiolite. There are other similar âophioliticâ formations on the Earth, so the book includes travels to Cyprus, another ophiolitic complex similar to what prehistoric California may have looked like. Since geologists study how things were, traveling to far flung places with similar structures can transport them to the past. I got a healthy lesson in prehistoric geography from this book. I bookmarked several pages with map renderings of Gondwanaland, Laurasia, and the Tethys Ocean to get my bearings.
Natural history is a subject I donât read enough of. This book is an incredible piece of writing in general, regardless of format or genre. Like all of McPheeâs articles, essays, and other books Iâve read, this one is right up there with the best nonfiction. If you enjoy long form writing, I highly recommend Annals of the Former World for those interested in science.
McPhee is well known for his literary nonfiction, just look at his bibliography. âŠ
The USGS has a tool to browse its fantastic historical archive of topographic maps. âŠ
Yesterday I read this fascinating piece on the state of Louisianaâs 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 authorâs contentions is that the misrepresentation of the stateâs 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 isnât isolated to crises like the one happening on the Louisiana coast, itâs inherent in thousands of government-produced official maps both nationally and internationally. Some of the quotes in the article from GIS experts I thought did a good job demonstrating this fact, that old data tells lies:
He pulled up an aerial image of Pass Manchac, the channel between lakes Pontchartrain and Maurepas. On both the image and the Louisiana state map, the area appears to be forest. Anyone who has visited the flood-prone town of Manchac, about a 45-minute drive northwest of New Orleans, knows it is surrounded by wetlands. âPeople see the vegetation and the trees and think itâs land,â Mitchell said.
Where ancient natural processes of erosion and sedimentation collide with human influence â as in the canals, flood control systems, levees, and shipping channels in the bayous of Louisiana â it strikes a highlight through the age and inaccuracy of the maps on record. As a contributor in the article states, the various layers of government-produced data that are generally thought to be relatively static can be decades old:
His experience updating maps with digital tools has exposed how inconsistent existing maps already were. âThe topographic layer might have been done in 1956, and the land cover layer was done in 1962, and the transportation came from 1945,â Mitchell said of his findings. âAnd those are some of the good ones.â
Keeping these sorts of data up to date is a costly affair, no doubt. But with a natural ecosystem as dynamic as that of southern LA, pretending that 50 year old data is good enough is an exercise in denial. The cartographer Harold Fisk created a map series in the 40s (featured in the piece) that shows a historical picture of the natural environment: a 200-mile wide swath of meandering Mississippi riverbed that was once used to spreading its southerly-transported sediment all over the southeast parts of Louisianaâs boot. This was massively disrupted when the Corps of Engineers rigidly fixed the riverbed shape of the river with dike and levee systems, to keep it from straying and affecting the extensive infrastructure and human settlement that runs along the riverfront from New Orleans to Natchez.
As drastic as the situation is, itâs one without a clear solution; itâs an issue of competing priorities, with completely opposite, but critical ends. Fixing the coastline and allowing renewed alluvial deposit to repair the missing land means tremendous impact on Louisianaâs oil and gas industry (one of the largest in the union). Doing nothing and keeping existing man-made infrastructure in place and unaffected means losing land at a lightning pace, not to mention the negative impact to the fishing industry up and down the coast (again, one of the nationâs largest producers). And with every passing year of the Corpsâ nonstop work to control the riverâs path, the risk of disastrous floods increases.
Last month at a GIS conference in New Orleans, I sat in on a talk given by Allison Plyer from The Data Center, a NOLA non-profit specializing in advocacy around opening and publishing civic map data for all sorts of local issues. She showed some of these maps published earlier this year by ProPublica in their âLosing Groundâ series. I highly recommend the ProPublica maps, as well as The Data Centerâs projects to showcase the human geography of greater NOLA, particularly their work post-Katrina.
Read the article, itâs a great piece of writing.
