Topic
places
- Cape Canaveral
The launch complex at Cape Canaveral.
- Edinburgh From The Air
Edinburgh from the air. Alfred Buckham, c. 1920.
- Places: The English Channel
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…
- Places: the Tes River Basin
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 Heritag…
- Places: Remnants of an Ancient Lake
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 pho…
- Places: Kimbolton Region
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…
- Places: The Kolyma River
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 seve…
- Places: Mergui Archipelago
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…
- Places: Col du Galibier
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,…
- Places: Great Slave Lake
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…
- Places: Lake Natron
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…
- Places: Richat Structure
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…
- The Deadly Logistics of Everest
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…
- Notre Dame
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…
- Sierra Nevada, Basin and Range
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…
- Weekend Reading: Mastery Learning, Burundi’s Capital, and SRTM
🎓 Mastery Learning and Creative Tasks 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 teach…
- Weekend Reading: Largest Islands, Linework, and Airline Mapping
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. 🏝…
- The World's Most Remote Buildings
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 on…
- China is Erasing its Border with Hong Kong
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…
- Weekend Reading: Exploring Zanzibar, Singapore of the Future, & Watching Basketball
🇹🇿 Exploring Zanzibar with Mapillary 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…
- Weekend Reading: Typing on iPad Pro, Climate Optimism, Visualizing GeoNames
📱iPad Diaries: Typing on the iPad Pro with the Smart Keyboard Folio 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…
- Alaska's Dalton Highway
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 Deadho…
- The Main Road Through the Heart of Africa
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 wom…
- Door to Hell
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 c…
- Nargin Island
I just found this spot off the coast of Baku, Azerbaijan. The island is called Nargin, and was a former Soviet military installation. You can see the abandoned base facilities and rusting, derelict hulks of ships on t…