The launch complex at Cape Canaveral.
Edinburgh from the air. Alfred Buckham, c. 1920.
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.
English Channel :: 50°01' N, 4°31' W
This one cropped up through Google’s Earth View Chrome extension.
The Tes River runs east to west into northwest Mongolia from the Sayan Mountains in Siberia.
It empties into the Uvs Nuur Basin, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
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.
Tes River :: 50°34' N, 93°39' E
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 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 lake’s ancient shorelines is still etched into desert landscapes — hundreds of kilometers from the shores of the modern lake.
If you look at the Lake today on Google Earth, you’ll see some amazing landforms where the Saharan dunes transition to swampland on the shores of the basin. There’s some incredibly high-resolution data in that region:
Lake Chad :: 13°0' N, 14°30' E
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 bottleneck at the mouth of a creek where creek outflows and high tidal waters back up, and when the tide falls rapidly, the onrush of draining water can’t get out fast enough.
It’s a beautiful shot of a wild and remote part of northwestern Australia.
Image Credit: Mapbox Satellite
Kimbolton Region :: 16°28' S, 123°48' E
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.
Nearby to the west you can see a pockmarked landscape of hundreds of glacial lakes that the river winds around. An amazing-looking landscape, but of course for 8-10 months out of the year looks much different — frozen beneath ice and snow. Remote, desolate places like this showcase how much impact ice and water can have on shaping the land.
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 a sense of scale to the archipelago (it’s a lot longer north to south than what the image shows).
Also found this interesting piece of trivia from Wikipedia:
In the 1965 James Bond film Thunderball, Ernst Stavro Blofeld demands that NATO pay the international criminal organization SPECTRE a ransom of white flawless diamonds worth £100 million to be deposited in the Mergui Archipelago off the coast of Myanmar.
One of my favorite Bond films!
Mergui Archipelago :: 12°00' N, 98°00' E
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 climbs on Col de la Croix de Fer, Col du Télégraphe, and the Galibier.
This year’s stage route includes the Galibier and another HC fixture in Col d’Izoard, also last seen in the 2017 edition when Warren Barguil had a memorable mountaintop finish there.
Col du Galibier :: 45°3'50.4" N, 6°24'28.8" E
Our place for today I found via NASA’s Earth Observatory feed: the Great Slave Lake of the Canadian Northwest Territory.
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. It is the deepest lake in North America, diving about 615 meters (2,020 feet)—almost the same extent as the world’s second tallest building, the Shanghai Tower.
It’s strange to imagine that you could be on a body of water that’s oceanic in size, miles out of sight of land, but in the middle of the remote Canadian wilderness. The glaciated scarring of the Simpson Islands on the east side must be truly impressive in person. Massive rocks and hundreds of tiny islands dotting the deep water.
I would bet that, if polled, most people would have no idea that 2 of the 10 largest lakes in the world are in Canada. The Great Bear Lake further north is even larger!
The Great Slave Lake :: 61°40' N, 114° W
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:
This one came from the Landsat 8 platform a couple of years ago. It’s a salt lake that sits in the East African Rift Valley and has a beautiful red tint that comes and goes with the blooms of “halophile” (I love that word, salt-loving) bacteria in the lake.
Lake Natron :: 02°25′S, 36°00′E
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.
Richat Structure :: 21°07'26.4"N, 11°24'07.2"W
Earlier this week I finished reading Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, his account of climbing Mount Everest and surviving the 1996 Everest disaster. The book reads like a thriller, giving the account of how an expedition team prepares for the climb, including the experience in country beforehand and acclimatization process for weeks leading up to the climb.
While reading it, I found myself wishing I had the visual aid of maps of the route, photos of the camps, and what certain of the landmarks (like the dangerous Khumbu Icefall) actually look like. This video gives a good sense of the monumental scale of the challenge of climbing the 29,000’ peak.
The news of the fire at Notre Dame in Paris was devastating to follow along with as the blaze continued to spread throughout the day on Monday of this week. Many people from the office and on Twitter were reminiscing about their own visits there in the past, which got me looking back at old photos of mine.
We visited Paris twice, once together on a tour in 2014 and again when Elyse was little in 2016. Both times we took walks down the Seine to Ile de la Cite. When the weather’s good in Parisian summer, the walk along the river and the site itself on the island are incredible.
The iconic towers on the front are enormous and ornate for an old structure, but my favorite pieces of architecture are the flying buttresses visible from the courtyard area, and the eroded gargoyles studding the sides.
I’m fortunate to have seen it multiple times. It’s a truly amazing structure in a beautiful city. Disasters like this week’s fire are an eye-opener to how fragile many of our historic sites and artifacts are. A run-of-the-mill electrical fire can undo so much history. The silver lining is that the firefighters on the scene were able to save it from total destruction.
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 wasn’t perfectly clear, but I caught pretty great views of the peaks and notches of the high Sierras.
The folds of the basin and range province as you pass over Nevada are some of my favorite landforms to check out from the air — 500 miles of alternating faulted mountains and flatlands.
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 usually consider a student to have finally “mastered” a skill when they can consistently answer related problems over an extended period of time.
It’s not every day you see the map changing:
Burundi is moving its capital from the shores of Lake Tanganyika and deep into the nation’s central highlands.
Authorities announced they would change the political capital from Bujumbura to Gitega, which is located over 100 kilometers (62 miles) to the east.
This is an awesome tool from Derek Watkins. It makes downloading SRTM data dead simple.
This week is some reading, but some simple admiring. I wanted to highlight the work of two cartographers I follow that is fantastic. We live in a great world that people can still make a living producing such work.
A beautiful, artistic work from David Garcia sorting each island’s landmass by area. My favorite map projects aren’t just eye candy, they also teach you something. I spent half an hour on Wikipedia reading about a few of these islands.
This is a project from cartographer Daniel Huffman using a combination of open datasets, projection twisting, meticulous design, and Illustrator skills. The finished product is really amazing. The attention to detail is stunning. I love the detailed step-by-step walkthrough on how it came together.
A library of vector graphics for cartographic design. Each one has a unique style and could be used in other products, since it’s public domain (awesome). This is another cool thing from Daniel Huffman.
Both of these guys do amazing work. Find more on their websites:
From one of my new favorite YouTube channels, The B1M, comes this list of the most remote buildings.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is straight out of science fiction.
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.
A fun travel post from the Mapillary team after FOSS4G in Dar es Salaam. A drive around Zanzibar collecting images for OpenStreetMap mapping. Also check out part 2 of the journey.
Singapore is an interesting experiment: a benevolent authoritarian government, small population, and limited geography to leverage and nurture. This documentary is a bit of a commercial for their plans for the future. Still some fun ideas that (if successful) other megacities could use to maintain quality of life with population growth.
This was a great explainer. I’ve only been seriously watching basketball a couple of years, and I was starting to figure out some of these techniques myself. It’s interesting to see how coaches and professional analysts approach watching a game.
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 for things like volume control and playback, and
Quillette always has good stuff. I’m on the side of the author here in general with respect to climate change: it’s a problem to be understood and responded to, but the loudest of the proponents of doing something about it propose massive, sweeping, unrealistic changes “or else.” This author and Steven Pinker (quoted in the piece) have the right idea. Take a long, optimistic view and look to history for similar circumstances, and take measured action over time.
I love analyses like this. Take the open GeoNames database, load it into Postgres, ask questions on patterns using SQL, visualize the distributions.
I wanted to find patterns in the names, so I explored if they started or ended in a certain way or just contained a certain word. With SQL this means that I was using the
%wildcard to find prefixes or suffixes. So for instance the following query would return return every word containing the word bad anywhere in the name:
SELECT * FROM geonames WHERE name ILIKE ‘%bad%’
This makes me want to revive my old gazetteer project and crawl around GeoNames again.
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 rain and pocked with muddy puddles, and where everyone I encountered wondered what in the world I was doing there at all.
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 floating marketplace will proceed throughout the day, with as many as a dozen pirogues lashed to the boat at any given time. It soon becomes clear to us that the regimen is completely symbiotic and anything but frivolous. Absent this commerce, the passengers don’t eat and the villagers don’t have medication for a baby’s fever or a new pot to replace the rusted one.
It’s hard to appreciate how remote (and lawless) huge reaches of the river are. The Congo drains a basin equal in size to the continental United States east of the Mississippi.
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 act as guides for the three-hour hike across the dunes to the crater.”
