Visitors

Thursday, February 27, 2014

International Polar Bear Day - Thanks to Google Maps


Google Street View has just gone on line to allow a virtual visit to polar bear country.

See the tundra environment of the polar bears in Cape Churchill and Wapusk National Park in Northern Manitoba.

Polar Bear Country in Google Street View

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

NASA Data Find Some Hope for Water in Aral Sea Basin

NASA Data Find Some Hope for Water in Aral Sea Basin

From: NASA News
February 14, 2014





A new study using data from NASA satellite missions finds that, although the long-term water picture for the Aral Sea watershed in Central Asia remains bleak, short-term prospects are better than previously thought.
Once the fourth largest inland sea in the world, the Aral Sea has lost 90 percent of its water volume over the last 50 years. Its watershed -- the enormous closed basin around the sea -- encompasses Uzbekistan and parts of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

Graduate student Kirk Zmijewski and assistant professor Richard Becker of the University of Toledo, Ohio, wanted to find out whether all of the water was gone for good, or whether some of it might have ended up elsewhere in the watershed, behind dams or in aquifers. They also wanted to gauge whether decreasing rainfall has contributed to the catastrophic water loss.

The researchers used data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites to map monthly changes in mass within the watershed from 2003 to 2012. These changes are associated with changes in water volume, both on and below the land surface. They mapped the entire Aral Sea watershed, which is more than twice the size of Texas at 580,000 square miles (1.5 million square kilometers).

Zmijewski and Becker found that each year throughout the decade, the watershed lost an average of 2.9 to 3.4 cubic miles (12 to 14 cubic kilometers) of water, or the equivalent of one Lake Mead per year. That's a sobering rate of loss, but it's only about half as much as the rate at which the Aral Sea itself is losing water (5.8 cubic miles or 24 cubic kilometers).

"That means that roughly half the water lost from the Aral Sea has entirely left the watershed, by evaporation or agricultural uses, but half is upstream within the watershed," said Becker.

Specifically, more water is now in the central part of the watershed, where almost all of the region's farming takes place. That area increased in mass during the last four years of the study. The researchers believe that some of the increase comes from improvements in water conservation practices, though some was simply the result of inefficient irrigation, for example, water seeping out of unlined ditches into aquifers.

Decreasing rainfall in the region has been widely reported, and the researchers wanted to quantify its role in the water loss. They were unable to find a complete and reliable published rainfall record for the entire watershed using ground-based measurements, so they analyzed rainfall data from NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite. Unexpectedly, they found no change in precipitation since 2002. “That was more surprising to us than anything else,” said Becker. To check that result, they extended their analysis back to 1980, using data from the Global Precipitation Climatology Project for the earlier years. There was no sign of dwindling precipitation for the watershed across the entire 30-year period.

Patterns of rainfall have shifted near the Aral Sea, Becker pointed out, and that may have misled observers into believing that rain was decreasing overall. “Lake-effect precipitation downwind of the Aral Sea has decreased, but precipitation over the sea itself has increased, so that’s not changing the whole system,” he said.

The basin’s water woes began in the 1930s with a Soviet development plan to create a cotton industry in the Central Asian desert. Rivers flowing into the Aral Sea were diverted to nourish the thirsty crop, setting off the inland sea's decline. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, several watershed countries have maintained a cotton-based economy.

Declining availability of freshwater due to human activities and climate change is a critical issue throughout the world, affecting agriculture, economics and politics. Becker said, "When water is removed from the watershed, agricultural prospects in the region decline. It's hopeful that investments in irrigation upgrades have decreased water losses. With savvy water policy, each country in the watershed could continue to improve in the future."

The research was published January 31 in the journal Earth Interactions.

For a slideshow of the shrinking Aral Sea during the 21st century, visit: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldOfChange/aral_sea.php.

For more about GRACE, visit: http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/.

NASA monitors Earth's vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing. The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.

For more information about NASA's Earth science activities in 2014, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/earthrightnow.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Amazing extratropical cyclone over the United Kingdom

From Google Earth Blog - February 18, 2014

The NASA Earth Observatory site is constantly releasing amazing images from space, including items such as this stunning view of an extratropical cyclone over the United Kingdom that was captured last week.


This particular cyclone brought winds of over 100 miles per hour, and caused power outages to more than 700,000 people. They released a large image to show it off, which Mickey Mellen has matched up in an image overlay and included in this KML file for you to view directly in Google Earth.

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

The Allure of the Map

Great article from the New Yorker called "The Allure of the Map" looking at the relationship between maps and literature. Posted by January 22, 2014
1-Treasure-island-map-1000.jpg
Map of Treasure Island, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island.” (Click for a larger version.)
For years, I carried the same map wherever I went. When I wasn’t travelling, Scotch Tape held it to the back of my bedroom door: it was visible to me when the door was closed, but invisible to almost everyone else. That map moved from dorm rooms to apartments and houses, from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to New England, from New England to the United Kingdom, and back again.

When I felt homesick, I would drag my fingers up and down the map’s paper folds, tracing its shorelines and rivers, wishing they were the real thing. But touching that map only made me more homesick. What I wanted was a map of exact scale, one that wasn’t just a representation but reality itself, the sort imagined by Lewis Carroll in “Sylvie and Bruno Concluded”:
“What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?”
“About six inches to the mile.”
“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I enquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”
I suppose anyone who is homesick or lost wants that mile-to-mile correspondence. But Carroll’s map is pure fiction, and not only because of its outlandish scale. No map can be a perfect representation of reality; every map is an interpretation, which may be why writers are so drawn to them.

Writers love maps: collecting them, creating them, and describing them. Literary cartography includes not only the literal maps that authors commission or make themselves but also the geographies they describe. The visual display of quantitative information in the digital age has made charts and maps more popular than ever, though every graphic, like every story, has a point of view.

Maps are a standard of adventure, fantasy, and science fiction. Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel “Treasure Island” did not begin with Billy Bones or Jim Hawkins, but with a map. Summering in Scotland, in 1881, Stevenson entertained his twelve-year-old stepson by painting when the rain and cold kept them indoors. Stevenson writes, in an essay: “On one of these occasions I made the map of an island; it was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully colored; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbors that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance ‘Treasure Island.’ ”

Not only did the map give Stevenson a setting; it shaped the novel’s narrative and characters. Stevenson wrote that, when he “pored upon [his] map of ‘Treasure Island,’ the future characters of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting, and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection.” The map printed in the novel’s pages was not some final flourish but a record of its very origins.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Earthsea Trilogy” also began with a map she drew herself. Even when they are not mapmakers, fantasy and science-fiction authors have overseen the creation of cartographic representations of their fictional worlds. J. R. R. Tolkien commissioned Pauline Baynes, who learned mapmaking in the Ministry of Defence during the Second World War, to create maps of his fictional land, Middle Earth: her delicate elven script proclaimed place names, tree-dotted forests and sharp-peaked mountain ranges giving depth to the scenery, and a selection of inserts illustrated some of the architecture, characters, and creatures.

Writing to his publisher in 1949, after receiving some of Baynes’s drawings for “Farmer Giles of Ham,” Tolkien expressed his satisfaction with her art: “They are more than illustrations, they are a collateral theme. I showed them to my friends whose polite comment was that they reduced my text to a commentary on the drawings.” The same could be said for her map of Middle Earth, which influenced the way many readers visualized the imaginary world. Tolkien was so satisfied with her work that he introduced her to his friend C. S. Lewis, for whom she mapped Narnia. More recently, Lev Grossman saw to the production of elaborate maps, by Roland Chambers, for his novels “The Magicians” and “The Magician King.” And George R. R. Martin even printed an entire volume of maps to accompany his series “A Song of Ice and Fire,” which began with the book “A Game of Thrones.”

Genre fiction often involves cartographic illustration, but so, too, do highly regionalist works. Sherwood Anderson commissioned a map of the titular town “Winesburg, Ohio,” as did the novelist Jan Karon for her novels set in the fictional town of Mitford, North Carolina. Henry David Thoreau surveyed Walden Pond for a map that he included in “Walden,” and William Faulkner drew his own map of Yoknapatawpha County for the publication of “Absalom, Absalom!” Faulkner revised the map ten years later for “The Portable Faulkner,” going so far as to call himself “sole owner and proprietor,” and adding a note: “Surveyed & mapped for this volume by William Faulkner.”

Every map tells a story, and writers yearning for new ways to tell stories are drawn to them. Walter Benjamin wrote of how he had “long, indeed for years, played with the idea of setting out the sphere of life—bios—graphically on a map.” Written when he was forty, “A Berlin Chronicle” resists a standard, linear biography and, instead, plots a map. Rather than a chronology, Benjamin creates a geography of Berlin; the relationships and events of the author’s life become map dots rather than plot points. A geographical map of Berlin converges with Benjamin’s personal map of the city, though Benjamin is still dependent on sentences and paragraphs.

Peter Turchi argues in his book “Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer” that all writers are mapmakers and that all writing is like a map. For Turchi, the map is more than metaphor: it is an organizing principle of narrative. Language is like a land, paragraphs are districts, sentences are streets, and words are only lines and curves constructed the way maps are made of lines and shapes. Letters are like wild canyons and chaotic seas that the writer maps into words and then into sentences and then into scenes.

Consider Teju Cole’s recent use of Twitter for his short story “Hafiz.” After distributing phrases and sentences to participants who then tweeted them from their own accounts, Cole mapped the story through a series of retweets. On their own, the pieces of the story were scattered and easily buried in cacophonous feeds of unrelated links, quotations, and thoughts; with Cole to map the story, tweeting the pieces in their proper order, a narrative became clear. Just as a cartographer makes sense of the world, Cole made sense of the territory of Twitter, shaping a story from chaos.

A tweet-for-tweet map of Twitter would be not only exhaustive but impossible, like the mile-for-mile map of Lewis Carroll’s novel, which Jorge Luis Borges later made into its own story:
In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

Borges called the piece “Of Exactitude in Science,” and packaged it as a bit of fictional lore with the notation “Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658.” It’s an elaborate fabrication of a historical text, one that conveys the essential division between reality and representation. A map that is too exact becomes the thing it maps, endangering both.

A map equal to what it maps would be more than “cumbersome”; it would be disastrous—a fact proven by Neil Gaiman’s return to the maps of Borges and Carroll in his short story “The Mapmaker,” in which Borges’s empire becomes China, and the avaricious desire for a representation equal to reality is embodied by an emperor. “The more accurate the map,” Gaiman writes, “the more it resembles the territory.”
And so begins the emperor’s quest for perfect similitude. First, he creates a miniature version of the empire on an island, with attendants modifying it every morning to fix natural changes that have occurred in the model and form alterations that have occurred in the empire itself. Not satisfied, the emperor imagines a larger, more accurate “map-world” at one-hundredth the scale of the empire and, then, something even grander: “A map…of the imperial dominions, in which each house shall be represented by a life-sized house, every mountain shall be depicted by a mountain, every tree by a tree of the same size and type, every river by a river, and every man by a man.”

Such a map, Gaiman writes, is “perfectly accurate and perfectly useless,” and the emperor dies before it is completed. The literary equivalent of the emperor’s map would be a biography of everyone in the world, or a novel of every second of every minute of every day: literature, like a map, gains its power from selection, from miniaturization. And the writer, like the cartographer, must make careful decisions about every aspect of the map: from letters to words, sentences, and paragraphs, from chapters to sections and volumes. Literary cartography fascinates and guides the way that actual cartography does; that’s why we keep and carry stories in the same places we carry and keep maps: on our walls, in our pockets, and on our phones.

Casey N. Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Europe's oldest footprints uncovered on English coast


Date: February 7, 2014
Source: Queen Mary University of London

Summary:

The earliest human footprints outside of Africa have been uncovered, on the English coast, by a team of scientists. Their discovery offers researchers an insight into the migration of pre-historic people hundreds of thousands of years ago when Britain was linked by land to continental Europe.




Area A at Happisburgh: View of footprint surface looking south, also showing underlying horizontally bedded laminated silts.

Credit: Photo by Simon Parfitt / From: Ashton N, Lewis SG, De Groote I, Duffy SM, Bates M, et al. (2014) Hominin Footprints from Early Pleistocene Deposits at Happisburgh, UK. PLoS ONE 9(2): e88329. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0088329


The earliest human footprints outside of Africa have been uncovered, on the English coast, by a team of scientists led by Queen Mary University of London, the British Museum and the Natural History Museum.

Up to five people left the series of footprints in mud on the bank of an ancient river estuary over 800,000 years ago at Happisburgh in northeast Norfolk.

Dr Simon Lewis from Queen Mary's School of Geography has been helping to piece together the geological puzzle surrounding the discovery -- made in May 2013 -- which is evidence of the first known humans in northern Europe.

Dr Lewis's research into the geology of the site has provided vital information on the sediments in which the prints were found. "My role is to work out the sequence of deposits at the site and how they were laid down. This means I can provide a geological context for the archaeological evidence of human occupation at the site."

The importance of the Happisburgh footprints is highlighted by the rarity of footprints surviving elsewhere. Only those at Laetoli in Tanzania at about 3.5 million years and at Ileret and Koobi Fora in Kenya at about 1.5 million years are older.

A lecturer in physical geography, and co-director of the Happisburgh project (http://www.ahobproject.org/), Dr Lewis added that the chance of encountering footprints such as this was extremely rare; they survived environmental change and the passage of time.

Timing was also crucial as "their location was revealed just at a moment when researchers were there to see it" during a geophysical survey. "Just two weeks later the tide would have eroded the footprints away."

"At first we weren't sure what we were seeing," explains Dr Nick Ashton of the British Museum "but as we removed any remaining beach sand and sponged off the seawater, it was clear that the hollows resembled prints, and that we needed to record the surface as quickly as possible."

Over the next two weeks researchers used photogrammetry, a technique that can stitch together digital photographs to create a permanent record and 3D images of the surface. It was the analysis of these images that confirmed that the elongated hollows were indeed ancient human footprints.

In some cases the heel, arch and even toes could be identified, equating to modern shoes of up to UK size 8. While it is not possible to tell what the makers of these footprints were doing at the time, analysis has suggested that the prints were made from a mix of adults and children.

Their discovery offers researchers an insight into the migration of pre-historic people hundreds of thousands of years ago when Britain was linked by land to continental Europe.

At this time, deer, bison, mammoth, hippo and rhino grazed the river valley at Happisburgh. The land provided a rich array of resources for the early humans with edible plant tubers, seaweed and shellfish nearby, while the grazing herds would have provided meat through hunting or scavenging.

During the past 10 years the sediments at Happisburgh have revealed a series of sites with stone tools and fossil bones; this discovery is from the same deposits.

The findings are published in the science journal PLOS ONE.

The work at Happisburgh forms part of a new major exhibition at the Natural History Museum Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story opening on February 13.


Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Queen Mary University of London. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:

Nick Ashton, Simon G. Lewis, Isabelle De Groote, Sarah M. Duffy, Martin Bates, Richard Bates, Peter Hoare, Mark Lewis, Simon A. Parfitt, Sylvia Peglar, Craig Williams, Chris Stringer. Hominin Footprints from Early Pleistocene Deposits at Happisburgh, UK. PLoS ONE, 2014; 9 (2): e88329 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0088329

Friday, February 7, 2014

Sochi by satellite!

Satellite images of the Sochi Olympic venues, courtesy of NASA

In these images, red indicates vegetation, white is snow, buildings appear in grey, and the ocean is dark blue.



In this image, available at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/pia17970, the Olympic Park Coastal Cluster for indoor sports appears as a circular area on the shoreline in the bottom center of the image. There's a separate arena for curling, alongside multiple arenas for hockey and skating. The actual city of Sochi, which has a population of about 400,000, is not visible in the picture.


This second image, at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/pia17971, centers on the Rosa Khutar ski resort in the mountains near Sochi. That's where the alpine Olympic events will be held. The resort is in the valley at center, and the ski runs are visible on the shadowed slopes on the left-hand side of the valley. The runs may be rated double black diamond, but they're not quite as steep as they appear in this image. Height is exaggerated 1.5 times to bring out topographic details.

Sochi Olympics and ArcGIS Online Resources

For Educators, from Jean Tong, Manager - K-12 Teaching and Learning ESRI.



Are you incorporating the Sochi Olympics into your teaching? Check out the following interactive maps created using ArcGIS Online.

Tour the eleven athletic venues built for the Winter Olympic games.

Forty cities on four continents have hosted the Olympics since the first modern games were held in 1896. Explore this story map to analyze the distribution of the games across the world.

Where are Canadian Olympic Athletes from?

Visit arcgis.com and search for other Olympic themed content and maps.

Go Canada Go!


Thanks Jean!

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Greenland's fastest glacier reaches record speeds


Date: February 3, 2014

Source: Science Daily based on work from European Geosciences Union (EGU)



Jakobshavn Isbræ (Jakobshavn Glacier) is moving ice from the Greenland ice sheet into the ocean at a speed that appears to be the fastest ever recorded. Researchers from the University of Washington and the German Space Agency (DLR) measured the dramatic speeds of the fast-flowing glacier in 2012 and 2013.

The results are published today in The Cryosphere, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).

"We are now seeing summer speeds more than 4 times what they were in the 1990s on a glacier which at that time was believed to be one of the fastest, if not the fastest, glacier in Greenland," says Ian Joughin, a researcher at the Polar Science Center, University of Washington and lead-author of the study.

In the summer of 2012 the glacier reached a record speed of more than 17 kilometres per year, or over 46 metres per day. These flow rates are unprecedented: they appear to be the fastest ever recorded for any glacier or ice stream in Greenland or Antarctica, the researchers say.

They note that summer speeds are temporary, with the glacier flowing more slowly over the winter months. But they add that even the annually averaged speedup over the past couple of years is nearly 3 times what it was in the 1990s.

This speedup of Jakobshavn Isbræ means that the glacier is adding more and more ice to the ocean, contributing to sea-level rise. "We know that from 2000 to 2010 this glacier alone increased sea level by about 1 mm. With the additional speed it likely will contribute a bit more than this over the next decade," explains Joughin.

Jakobshavn Isbræ, which is widely believed to be the glacier that produced the large iceberg that sank the Titanic in 1912, drains the Greenland ice sheet into a deep ocean fjord on the coast of the island. At its calving front, where the glacier effectively ends as it breaks off into icebergs, some of the ice melts while the rest is pushed out, floating into the ocean. Both of these processes contribute about the same amount to sea-level rise from Greenland.


As the Arctic region warms, Greenland glaciers such as Jakobshavn Isbræ have been thinning and calving icebergs further and further inland. This means that, even though the glacier is flowing towards the coast and carrying more ice into the ocean, its calving front is actually retreating. In 2012 and 2013, the front retreated more than a kilometre further inland than in previous summers, the scientists write in the new The Cryosphere study.

In the case of Jakobshavn Isbræ, the thinning and retreat coincides with an increase in speed. The calving front of the glacier is now located in a deeper area of the fjord, where the underlying rock bed is about 1300 metres below sea level, which the scientists say explains the record speeds it has achieved. "As the glacier's calving front retreats into deeper regions, it loses ice -- the ice in front that is holding back the flow -- causing it to speed up," Joughin clarifies.

The team used satellite data to measure the speed of the glacier as part of US National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA studies. "We used computers to compare pairs of images acquired by the German Space Agency's (DLR) TerraSAR-X satellites. As the glacier moves we can track changes between images to produce maps of the ice flow velocity," says Joughin.

The researchers believe Jakobshavn Isbræ is in an unstable state, meaning it will continue to retreat further inland in the future. By the end of this century, its calving front could retreat as far back as the head of the fjord through which the glacier flows, about 50 km upstream from where it is today.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by European Geosciences Union (EGU). Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


Journal Reference:
  1. I. Joughin, B. E. Smith, D. E. Shean, D. Floricioiu. Brief Communication: Further summer speedup of Jakobshavn Isbr. The Cryosphere, 2014; 8 (1): 209 DOI: 10.5194/tc-8-209-2014

Monday, February 3, 2014

Name That Place!

A great bit of fun by by Joseph Kerski posted 

Can you or your students “Name That Place” based on a series of satellite images?  Joseph Kerski has created a multiple-choice quiz about the Earth based on satellite imagery in ArcGIS Online.  The 20 multiple-choice questions he has included address such varied topics as land use change, urban rivers, natural hazards, waterfalls and canals, erosion, ports, temples, glacial terrain, landfills, urban patterns, and more.  At the end of the quiz, he includes not only the answers, but discussion of each issue, why the issue is important, and reasons why two of the choices are incorrect and why one choice has to be the correct answer.  He has also created a video version of the quiz.

London, Paris, or Hamburg?

London, Paris, or Hamburg?  Earth quiz using satellite imagery in ArcGIS Online.

Those of you who have been following this blog and its focus of promoting deep and rich investigations of the Earth using geotechnologies in an inquiry-driven environment might find the idea of an Earth quiz at odds with this blog’s philosophy.  Kerski assures you this is not so.  Quizzes such as these (1) can provide a fun and challenging way of introducing fundamental concepts and themes about the Earth, such as river systems, land use practices, sustainable agriculture, population change, and so much more; (2) can introduce and reinforce image interpretation skills; (3) can foster and understanding of the importance of scale; and (4) can build skills in using tools such as ArcGIS Online, which is the basis for this quiz.  In the quiz, unlike a static presentation based on PowerPoint, for example, you and your students can zoom in and out, and pan the image map.  The quiz is thus a dynamic, multimedia environment, and a springboard for further investigation using ArcGIS Online, where additional layers can be added and analyzed.