When you cross the border from Chile into Argentina, you see this sign:

If you aren't familiar with "Las Islas Malvinas," that's because they go by another name in English. Perhaps the detailed map will help clarify the location? The sign refers to the Falkland Islands, currently held by the United Kingdom. So the sign translates to, "The Falklands are Argentinian." The British and the Argentinians faught a war over the Falklands in 1982. The UK won, but Argentina maintains their claims of sovereignty. And as soon as you enter Argentina, they remind you of it. I think they hope you will take pictures of the sign and post them on your geology blog so the world is reminded of what they consider to be an imperial injustice.

The bus ride from Puerto Natales to El Calafate was long -- something like five hours. It went through some very empty country:

As we headed north, with the mountains to our west and wide-open plains to our east, I was reminded of Montana, specifically the Front Range southeast of Glacier National Park. It was very familiar feeling.

The landscape was semi-desert, as the eastward-moving air is drained of its moisture as it crosses the Andes. The rainshadow effect leaves this an area of steppe. The golden grasses draped on the dry hills bring to mind similar landscapes in Mongolia or Africa.


And there are even some birds that you might mistake for African species:

That's our best of many lousy pictures of the Lesser Rhea, also known as "Darwin's Rhea." It's a ratite bird, related to ostriches, emus, cassowaries, kiwi, and elephant birds (the last of which are extinct). The coolest rhea sighting we had was a family of little ones following their mom. The little ones look just like scaled-down miniature adults: Comical!

We stopped at an estancia (ranch) before entering Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, and Lily made friends with a horse there:

She used to have a horse on Hawaii, so this was sweet to see. When we walked off towards the rhea, he followed along, looking for more lovin' from his new American girlfriend.

We were in Argentina to see the massive Perito Moreno Glacier. It is the #1 tourist attraction in Argentina, and is located in Parque Nacional Los Glaciares ("The Glaciers National Park"). Here's our first view of it:


Now here's a test to see how true-blue your geological inclinations run. When you looked at that last picture, did you think to yourself, "What's up with those strata in the lower right? Are those turbidites?"

Yes, indeed. They are:

Alternating sand (blocky) and mud (weathered into low relief) remind us of the Magallanes Basin, which (like most geology) does not stop at the border...

Um, there's two clear joint sets there too.

Around the corner we saw some bivalve fossils and a few clastic dikes ("injectites"). Here's a small clastic dike:


When I brought up clastic dikes the other day when discussing Torres del Paine, Brian responded with some injectite photos of his own. You should check those out. Here's a bigger one from P.N. Los Glaciares:


I've got a ton of photos of Perito Moreno Glacier to show you, but it's really worth saving them for a second post. For now, let's just say: "We went and looked at the glacier for several hours and were very impressed." ...More on that tomorrow.

Then we were bussed back to El Calafate, the town which serves as the main access point for the park, and walked from our hostel towards downtown for some dinner. Along the way, we saw this cool outcrop:

That's very-poorly-lithified silt, peppered here and there with a few cobbles and boulders. The clasts bear scratches, suggesting they are glacially-delivered. The town of El Calafate is on the shore of a big lake called Lago Argentino, and I interpret this outcrop to mean that the lake was much larger and deeper in the past (perhaps dammed by a moraine which has since been partially breached?). In this deeper, earlier version of the lake, icebergs calved off of Perito Moreno Glacier and floated out to melt and drop their sedimentary loads in the offshore sediments. The big boulders and cobbles are therefore dropstones, though I wasn't able to confirm this diagnosis by looking for squished or truncated sedimentary laminations beneath them. (Given that this is earthquake country, I didn't want to be standing underneath those boulders for longer than it took to snap a photo!)

That evening, we had a really world-class meal. Salads and breads and fine Argentinan wine (we skipped the Mendoza stuff and got the Patagonian label, "Saurus." (Yes, as in lizards -- as in "giant, fossilized, terrible lizards"). And for the main course? Well... let's just say that if you're a vegetarian, you should probably stop reading at this point.

The Patagonians herd a lot of sheep, and so they eat of lot of lamb. They have one particular method of cooking this lamb which I was very keen to try because it seems so utterly brutal. Meat is murder, as they say: delicious murder. I am quite aware of the loss of life that comes with the consumption of meat. I have hunted, and I have killed animals in order to eat them. Many people opt not to think about this, and to access their meat in a box or a bag. But to the Patagonians, the death of their animals is both obvious and inoffensive. They slaughter their lamb, gut it and skin it, and then (this is the part that's brutal) they string it up to an iron cross, which is then tilted over a campfire so the lamb can roast slowly. They call it "crucified lamb."

It was delicious -- though the photo may appear shocking to some readers. But, hey: Catholics claim to eat crucified flesh every time they take communion, right? (Apologies in advance to all the transubstantiationists that I just offended.) ...Back to the lamb: I have a special place in my heart for the taste of mutton (I served in Peace Corps Mongolia in 1998-1999), and that familiar gamey tang was present here as well. But it was so much more tender, and served with a garlicky oregano olive oil-based sauce. Oh man, it was good. (Mongolians could learn a lot from Argentinians about how to spice their lamb.) I devoured it, and Lily had to roll me down the street, back to the hostel. Mmmmm....

Okay -- tomorrow you'll get some glacier photos.

Labels: argentina, birdies, england, food, joints, maps, mongolia, national parks, patagonia, sediment, south america, travel

I knew the Expanding-Earthers were loonies, and I'm astonished that there are still Flat-Earthers out there, but not only flat but also a square? Surely no one could hold to such an outlandish belief, right? Wrong... The Square Earthers are apparently alive and well. Astonishing.

Via Strange Maps.

Labels: maps, pseudoscience

From Puerto Natales, we took a bus with other backpackery types north to Torres del Paine National Park, the main object of our trip. It was a bit rainy when we left the bus and walked off into the park, aiming to complete the Grand Circuit, a 7-day, 100-km hike around the Paine Massif. Heading down the trail:


Google Map of the Paine Massif, the main focus of the national park:

It's a little offshoot of the main Andean cordillera, a relatively isolated block of mountains rising from the Patagonian steppe. The park is named for some towers ("torres" in Spanish) in the eastern part of the massif. The word "paine" ("pie-nay") apparently means "light blue" in the pre-Spanish native language. This is apparently because many of the lakes (so prominent in these maps) are light blue in color due to the large influx of suspended glacial "milk."

Here's the specific route we took (approximately) in blue:

We hiked in a counter-clockwise direction.

So we started off over in the eastern part of the park, headed north by northwest. We were hiking through steppe, with the snow-covered mountains rising to the west:


...But wait, what's that on the horizon?

Guanacos! These are camellids -- related to the better-known llamas of Peru.

Thumbs-up for guanacos!


The rocks of Torres del Paine are mainly Cretaceous-aged turbidites (shale, graywacke, and conglomerate), intruded by granitic magma in the Eocene. All along the whole trip, I was drooling over the many beautiful graded beds I saw. Here's the first photogenic graded bed I found, with the paleo-top of the bed at the top of the photograph:


These rocks of the Cerro Toro Formation were deposited in the Magallanes Basin, a Cretaceous to Paleogene retroarc foreland basin. Brian Romans of Clastic Detritus shared some information with me before I went down to Patagonia, and I am indebted to him for the insights I gleaned from that sharing. However, any errors in identification or interpretation are my own. According to the model of Romans, et al. (2009)*, a fold and thrust belt was operating to the west, and an elongate north-south oriented submarine trough flexed downward east of that during the Cretaceous. Mud and sand and gravel flowed into this sedimentary basin mainly from the north in three phases which can be contrasted readily with one another in terms of depositional style and confinement of depositional area. These three phases of deposition correlate to different facies, and are exposed well in the area north of Puerto Natales due to subsequent deformation and uplift (not to mention recent deglaciation).

I'm a structural geologist, and deformation is what I am all about, but I honestly didn't expect to see much structure when in Torres del Paine. (I was eagerly anticipating the graded bedding, though!) So it was somewhat shocking to see some very deformed turbidites on that first day of hiking. Here's me standing on the edge of the Paine River, surrounded by tilted turbidite strata:


...And this stuff was really messed up:


Zoomed-in, you can see some severe folding and faulting having shuffled up these rocks:


We hiked about six or seven miles that first day, and camped at a place called Seron. The park has set up these dozen or so campgrounds where you are allowed legally to camp. Some are free, some cost a few bucks. Seron cost about $8 per person to camp there, but we got hot showers with that cost: Nice! The sun set on our first day, and we slept well.


More soon, on our second day of hiking...
____________________________________________
* Romans, B.W., Fildani, A., and Hubbard, S.M., 2009. "Controls on Deep-Water Stratigraphic Architecture," in Stratigraphic Evolution of Deep-Water Architecture: Examples of controls and depositional styles from the Magallanes Basin, southern Chile, SEPM Field Guide No. 10, p. 7.

Labels: chile, cretaceous, eocene, mammals, maps, national parks, paleocene, patagonia, primary structures, rain, sediment, snow, south america, structure, travel

Check out this interesting interactive map in today's Times - showing rental patterns from Netlfix.

To get a glimpse of the sociology of the DC area, compare the DC maps for "Milk" and "Paul Blart: Mall Cop." Wow.

Hat tip to Lily.

Labels: maps, movies

...from Google Maps:







The last one is where I am today, as this post automatically publishes. With any luck at all, I'll be over there by the glacier in the northwest. Merry Christmas from Patagonia, all!

Labels: art, chile, maps, south america

Holy cow... Have you seen this?



I found a reproduction of this lovely map in the pages of this month's Discover magazine. It is a map of the most remote places on our planet, as defined by their distance from major cities (and also shipping channels). The scale at the bottom shows you how many hours (or days) it would take to get from pixel A to the nearest city. The darkest spots are the most remote ones.

The map was produced by Andrew Nelson of the Global Environmental Monitoring Unit of the European Commission. It is available here in a bigger form. They grant authorization to reproduce it, so long as you attribute them as the authors. Amazing work, Mr. Nelson; Gorgeous!
The Sahara, the Amazon Basin, the Australian Outback, New Guinea, boreal Canada, Greenland, the Rub' al Khali, northern Siberia, the interior of Borneo, and the Tibetan Plateau all jump out as remote locations. I post this map today because this evening I'm getting on a plane and heading for another remote location, the dark spot down at the southern tip of South America. Lily and I are spending the holidays in Patagonia. I'll be there for the next two and a half weeks, and I'll be back to DC and NOVA in the new year. To keep you amused in the meantime, I've scheduled posts to appear here on the blog while I am away. Enjoy your holidays!

Labels: maps, patagonia, science and society, south america, travel

...more fun with Google Maps! Zoom out from each map to see what black part of the globe they depict.

Labels: contest, google, maps

I hung up my new copy of the Geological Map of Shenandoah National Park Region, Virginia in my office, using neodymium magnets (the best!) to "pin" it to a metal shelf. Gosh, it's beautiful.

Labels: blue ridge, geology, maps, nova, shenandoah

Got this yesterday via the NAGT newsletter:

REU Project in Yellowstone National Park

Greetings from Montana! We would appreciate your help in advertising to your students an NSF/GEO site project we will be running this summer on Evolution of the Precambrian Rocks of Yellowstone National Park (Dave Mogk, Paul Mueller, Darrell Henry, and Dave Foster PIs). Please visit the project website for further details. This project will be a comprehensive research experience that will include:

• Field mapping and sampling in Yellowstone National Park to contribute to a new geologic map of the basement rocks of YNP; students will work in small groups in the context of the larger project to define and address specific research topics in their area of interest; Dates: June 27-July 25, 2010;
• Direct experience in modern analytical studies including sample preparation, training on modern instrumentation petrologic, geochemical and geochronological; visits to analytical labs will be scheduled for fall semester 2010, and
• Presentation of research results, by submitting an abstract for a poster presentation at the Rocky Mountain Section meeting of the Geological Society of America, and participating in a group reunion meeting to contribute to a peer-reviewed journal article. Dates: Spring 2011, to be determined; Logan, Utah.

We are looking for a group of students (12) with diverse interests in geology to contribute to the research group. To unravel the geologic history of these Archean rocks, our research team will need students with interests in igneous and metamorphic petrology, sedimentology, geochemistry, geochronology and structural geology and tectonics. Students who have taken most of their geology “core” courses and have had a field camp (or other field experience) will be preferred. This experience will provide a great foundation for follow-on senior thesis/research projects at their home institutions. Please note that this will be a true back country experience in Yellowstone National Park, so students need to know that the daily routine will be physically challenging in this rugged terrain.

How to Apply:
Please send: a) Your letter of interest, stating what you hope to learn, what you can offer to this project, b) two letters of support from faculty or work supervisors, and c) your academic transcript . These materials can be submitted to (e-mail or mail):
David Mogk mogk@montana.edu
Dept of Earth Sciences (406) 994 6916
Montana State University
Bozeman, MT 59717

The deadline for applications is: January 30, 2010

Thanks in advance, and please, encourage your best, field-oriented students to apply!

Labels: field trips, maps, national parks, teaching, wyoming, yellowstone

This is a new, useful tool: an online map that can guide you to rough information about local geology, and then to detailed geologic maps. The National Geologic Map Database appears to be a joint project between the USGS and the Association of American State Geologists. Here's what it looks like when you go to the website:




You can then close the little "About" information tab in the lower right:



Next, grab the screen and scroll to an area that you're interested in:



Double-click or use the "zoom" lever at upper left to zoom in:



Open the "Map Unit Info" tab to select individual map units and learn more about them:



After you do that, clicking anywhere in the map will bring up information about the rock units generally found in that area:



If you need more information, hover over the rock unit name in the "Map Unit Info" tab:



Close the "Map Unit Info" tab and open the "Map List" tab to get a list of all the USGS geologic maps available in your field of view:



Click on one of them to open up a red "footprint" on the map showing the area it covers:



An additional window will pop up with information about the map. Click on the number "2" in this new window to open the map itself:



It opens in a new tab, and is initially quite zoomed-out:



But you can zoom in, of course:



In fact, you can zoom in really far, until you start seeing pixels:



There are some design flaws in the interface, but overall, I think I'm willing to overlook them so I can get access to this sort of information. It strikes me as very, very useful: a rich dataset, waiting to be mined.

Labels: geology, maps, websites

Yet five more of the maps I scanned from my recently-entered-the-public-domain copy of Vernon Quinn's book A Picture Map Geography of the United States. As before, clicking on the image will take you to a bigger version of the map. Enjoy!

Labels: art, books, connecticut, maps, maryland, new york, oregon, washington

Five more of the maps I scanned from my recently-entered-the-public-domain copy of Vernon Quinn's book A Picture Map Geography of the United States. As before, clicking on the image will take you to a bigger version of the map. Enjoy!

Labels: art, books, california, georgia, idaho, maps, utah, west virginia

Labels: art, books, colorado, indiana, louisiana, maps, michigan, new mexico

Labels: arizona, art, books, delaware, maine, maps, new jersey, pennsylvania

Lola helps me plan a winter break journey...

She goes berserk for large expanses of paper... A few minutes after I took this picture, the little brat punched a hole in the map and ran off in a sprint. Sheesh.

Labels: argentina, chile, lola, maps, patagonia, south america, travel

Working through my RSS feed from the past week when I was out of town: Sheesh, it sure builds up if you don't stay on top of it! A couple of notable items to share:

The geography of tapirs, from the Why Evolution Is True blog.

The declining emphasis on literacy in our society, from Alternet.

Women geoscientists who read and/or write blogs: complete this survey!, from Kim.

Outcropedia, a new web project to catalog and share key outcrops.

Climate change graph jam, from Tamino. (With follow-ups from Lockwood)

Skeptics & athiests visit the Creation Museum. (ABC News)

Labels: blogs, evolution, graphics, humor, maps, politics, websites

Last week, I visited the Taconian Unconformity in the Catskills region of New York. I found out about the outcrop via the informative website the USGS put together in 2003 to explain southeastern New York's varied and interesting geology (Click here for a map).

Here's me at the angular unconformity, demonstrating the layering with my forearms:


Here's the same outcrop, sans goofball, avec annotations:


This is a classic angular unconformity. It even graced the cover of the (excellent) GSA publication Excursions in Geology and History: Field Trips in the Middle Atlantic States (Frank Pazzaglia, editor; cover photo by Marli Miller). Why should we care? Because like the "original" angular unconformity at Siccar Point in Scotland (described by James Hutton), this outcrop represents a lot of geologic time. First, during the Ordovician period, the Austin Glen formation had to be deposited as layers of clastic sediment in an ocean basin. Then, during the late Ordovician Taconian Orogeny, those layers had to be deformed: folded and buckled so they stood up on end, and then eroded down to their nubs. Then, on that newly-formed erosional surface, a fresh layer of sediment had to be laid down, in this case, the Rondout Formation was deposited as a layer of carbonate mud during the late Silurian period. Then, that too was deformed, during the Devonian period's Acadian Orogeny. Finally, the whole package had to be uplifted to the surface and exposed (in this case, when a highway roadcut was completed). That's a lot of time!

I'm delighted to have had the opportunity to visit it first-hand!

Labels: devonian, maps, mountains, new york, ordovician, silurian, structure, travel, unconformities

Virginia geologic map overlay for Google Earth -- you can click on the different units and it will tell you what rock type/formation they are. Pretty cool. Kind of clunky when I loaded it up on my home computer this morning, though.

Hat tip to Kyle House's Geologic Frothings blog for the alert.

Other states available too.

Also worth noting is an interactive Potassium-Argon age date map. In Virginia, you can use it to find the age of the lamprophyre dikes at the upstream end of Mather Gorge (~369 Ma) or find Alleghenian-aged pegmatites, or look at Triassic diabase ages contemporaneous with supercontinent breakup.

Labels: art, geology, google, isotopes, maps, tech, virginia

This map of the country of Mongolia was featured on the wall of Mongo's Mongolian Barbeque restaurant* in Quito, Ecuador. It is rendered in cowhide, with colored bits of leather doing all the decoration and adornment. It's really a pretty impressive work of art: cartographically accurate (with some omissions due to space constraints close to Ulaanbaatar), but also beautiful. It did not have a key or legend with it, but blue blobs represent lakes (like these). Yellow areas appear to represent high-elevation areas. Off-white appears to represent steppe, though the distribution shown on this map is not exactly how I would have drawn it. Brown circles are "major" cities, while blue circles represent villages. Of particular note to me was that my Peace Corps site, the itty-bitty village of Ereentsav, is located on the map, probably because it's a border-crossing town with Siberia. It's one of the two little blue dots in the northeast (upper right) of the map. Google Maps can show you the town's location on the Siberian border, though they spell its name differently ("Ereencav"):



Incredibly, the satellite photos for this region of the world are good enough that you can zoom in and see the house I lived in when I served there. See the green building in the middle? I lived in the little shed (half as wide as the green building, a little longer) just to its right (east). My outhouse is even visible -- the little square nubbin in the southern corner of the fenced-in area:



___________________________________________________________________

* "Mongolian Barbeque" is a branch of Inner Mongolian cuisine. Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region in China, with decent food. "Outer" Mongolia is the country of Mongolia, its own nation, distinct from China. I served there in the Peace Corps in 1998-1999, and I can tell you from experience that they do not serve especially good food. Maybe that's being too harsh... Let's just say that in Mongolia, you don't eat Mongolian Barbeque.

Labels: art, ecuador, maps, mongolia

Strange Maps has an interesting piece up today about where West Virginia came from (as a state): turns out it was all about the Civil War. The accompanying map shows the original proposed name for West Virginia, "Kanawha," as well as a proposed demarcation between Virginia and Maryland that trended along the western margin of the Blue Ridge physiographic province. If this boundary had come to pass, Virginia would have gotten the Valley & Ridge province, but Maryland would have retained the Blue Ridge, Piedmont and Coastal Plain.

Labels: blogs, blue ridge, coastal plain, history, maps, maryland, piedmont, valley and ridge, virginia, west virginia

Over the winter break, I read the new book Ancient Landscapes of the Colorado Plateau, by Ron Blakey & Wayne Ranney. This is an excellent read, and a terrific introduction to the geologic history of one the world's most dramatic landscapes. Blakey's maps have been featured on this blog before, and he has been kind enough to allow me to modify some for use on my field course websites (like here and here and here). The book goes through geologic time and makes extensive use of beautiful paleogeographic maps to reveal the story of mountain-building, transgression, regression, sand-dunes, faulting, volcanism, and erosion that characterizes the Colorado Plateau. It's not just paleogeographic maps, by the way: there are also plenty of shots of fossils, Colorado Plateau landscapes, and comparable modern depositional environments to enliven the story. It's a graphic story, well told with excellent graphics. I recommend you get yourself a copy if you've ever been to the Colorado Plateau, or if you ever plan on going there.

Find the book: On Amazon ... At the NOVA library

Labels: arizona, art, books, colorado, maps, new mexico, utah

What's the tallest mountain on Earth? Most would say Everest, since it's the highest point above sea level. I mentioned this issue as part of my lead-in to my Mauna Kea post, since some folks might claim Mauna Kea as the tallest, since it rises the most above its base on the oceanic crust of the Pacific Plate. But there's a third contender: Mount Chimborazo, in Ecuador.

The planet Earth is not a perfect sphere; it bulges a bit at the equator (about 13 miles) compared to the poles. The result is that if you look at two mountains of exactly the same elevation, one located at the pole and one at the equator, the equatorial one will be 13 miles further away from the center of the Earth than the polar one. That makes the peak of the tallest equatorial mountain (Chimborazo is at ~1.5 degrees south) the point on Earth that is furthest away from the center of the planet. It is 1.3 miles (2.1 km) further away from the center of the Earth than the summit of Everest is. NPR covered this surprising statistic in an entertaining piece in 2007. However, as the commenter on this post-NPR post notes, it's not just the silicate earth that bulges at the equator, it's the atmosphere, too. So it's not like the air is thinner at Chimborazo than Everest. You may be closer to the Moon atop Chimborazo, but you're not closer to "space" due to all that extra thick atmosphere above your head.

Here's a Google Maps "terrain view" map of Chimborazo (high relief peak east of El Arenal):


I had hoped to "auto-post" this while I'm traveling in Ecuador, for about the same time I would be looking at Chimborazo with my own eyes. However, I got sick over the holidays, and the persistent illness forced me to change my travel plans. I'll still be going to Ecuador -- but only for one week instead of the planned two. And I still hope to catch a glimpse of Mount Chimborazo. Hopefully when I get back to DC, I'll be able to share some photos of this superlative mountain. For now, the map will have to do.

Labels: ecuador, maps, mountains, south america, travel, volcano

Check this out: planners of next month's inauguration are using a giant map to figure all the logistics out.

Labels: dc, maps, news, politics

Labels: geology, maps, montana

A good post yesterday on Andrew's geology blog at About.com : "How many plates are there?" Some excellent points made, and made well.

All in favor of drawing the Somali Plate as its own entity on plate tectonic maps? Aye!

Labels: blogs, maps, plate tectonics

Four years ago, this website gave me some solace in looking at the breakdown between "red" and "blue" states. Now the author, Mark Newman, has performed some similar cartography on the 2008 presidential election results.

Labels: maps, politics, websites

Yesterday, I pulled up the Venetian blinds in my office window at NOVA, and this is what I saw:


Naturally, I had to take a photograph. It's puuurty.

While I had the camera out, I figured I'd shoot a few photos of the rest of my office, since it's full of all sorts of interesting clutter. Rather than explaining what all the doodads are in these photos, I figured it would be more fun to just post them and see if you can identify them all:















Have fun!

Labels: fossils, igneous, maps, metamorphism, minerals, nova, plants, sediment

In my new work with the Campus Landscaping & Beautification Committee, I've been asked to come up with a few locations for a pet project of mine. I want to create a series of "fake" geologic outcrops on campus so we can have a "fake" geology field trip without leaving campus. The idea here is to create outcrops (using real rocks) in contrived positions, so that students get experience with figuring out things like rock identification, relative dating, transgressive/regressive sequences, faulting, etc.

I got this idea from Matty (2006), which I stumbled across while xeroxing science education articles for an MSSE class this past spring. The basic point is to have clear, useful teaching examples that students can access outdoors (emphasizing those kinesthetic and naturalist intelligences), without having to deal with the costs (legal, insurance, gas, carbon footprint) of a "real" field trip.

As a first step towards coming up with recommendations about where our initial "fake" outcrops will be placed, I asked our campus architect for a map of the campus. I told him I would prefer one with topography on it. Sure enough, he gave me one with topography... and a 1-foot contour interval! I don't think I've ever seen a topographic map with that level of detail. Anyhow, it's a beautiful thing, and I wanted to share it with you. I've labelled the buildings with their two-letter call numbers. (I teach in the CT building, for instance, but my office is in CF.*) Check it out:

Comments on the map? Or on what you think ought to be included in a "Campus Geological Area"? You know how to comment...

* I hate these two-letter names. They are so utilitarian... Why must we call the CG Building "the CG Building," rather than Godwin Hall? That would be much more elegant and academic-sounding.

----------------------------------
Reference:
Matty, David J. (2006). "Campus landscaping by constructing mock geologic outcrops." Journal of Geoscience Education, v.54, n.4, p. 445-451.

Labels: maps, msse, nova

A colleague mentioned this website to me yesterday: Voting America.

Maintained by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond (Virginia), the website makes us of so-called "cinematic maps" which show how geopolitical data have changed over time for the lower 48 United States.

The different maps tell stories over time; I think it's a cool display of interesting information. However, a major omission is the exclusion of Alaska and Hawaii as contributing U.S. states. Check it out; let me know what you think.

Thanks Judith G. for alerting me to it!

Labels: maps, politics, virginia, websites

I leave this weekend to begin a two-month trip out west (Montana mainly, but also Grand Canyon and points in between). As I'm prepping for the trip, my cat Lola has been sabotaging my efforts to plan. Though I've reassured her that she'll get along great with my subletter, she is still obsessed with blocking my trip-planning progress.

Here she is lying on the roadmap of Colorado:



And here, covering the "explanation" for a geologic map of the states of the stable interior:



I love that my job allows me summer travel time, and I love that, living in DC, I can get a subletter to take over my rent and cat care during the time I'm away. But I will miss this little furball when I'm on the road. She's a great cat.

Labels: lola, maps, travel

Where's the geographical center of the United States of America? This article in today's Times visits it, or something like it, in South Dakota.

Is geoblogging a phenomenon yet? It must be, if Geotimes writes a story about it.

And: Elizabeth Kolbert profiles Buckminster Fuller in the New Yorker.

Labels: blogs, maps

Here's a photo of one of the cool things that my Honors students and I got to see on our recent trip up to Buffalo, New York (for the northeastern section meeting of GSA ):

That's an original, signed edition of the William Smith geologic map, brought to the meeting courtesy of the Buffalo Library. It is one of only two in the United States; the other is at the Library of Congress. The map found a home in Buffalo (of all places!) thanks to Chauncey Hamlin, the head of the Buffalo Museum of Science (then called the Buffalo Society of Natural Science) from 1920 to 1948. During his tenure, he assembled a collection of first editions of many seminal scientific works. First editions of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology and Herbert Hoover's* translation of Agricola's De Re Metallica were also on display at the conference.

* Yes, that Herbert Hoover, at least according to Wikipedia.

Labels: geology, history, maps, meetings, nova

What's the difference between these pictures?

... Find out at the NASA Earth Observatory feature page that examines "Cities at night: the view from space."

Labels: environmental, maps, satellite imagery

Here's a cool website that shows different maps of the world based on different data.

For instance, countries scaled to their population sizes:

Or here's the number of preventable deaths per country:

Build your own, or let me know if you find any other interesting ones...

Thanks to Anastassia for tipping me off on this one!

Labels: maps, websites

I've got a nice tough A.W.o.G.E. for you today. Hint: it's somewhere in the Virginia Piedmont. The presence of an airplane over the photographed site may help confirm the location, once you think you've found it.

In the comments section below, be the first to name the location and why the treeless area suffers so much sulfuric acid, and you will win a "GEOLOGY ROCKS" bumper sticker.

Labels: contest, google, maps, nova, piedmont

Take the next five minutes of your life, and watch this video about a cool new imaging experiment done by Kevin Gurney's research group at Purdue. They've taken pre-existing data about CO2 emissions and plotted it in a dynamic map. The most striking feature is the pulsating nature of the United States' CO2 emissions: we put out a lot during the day, and not so much at night. The maps really show this -- demonstrating yet again the power of images (over description) to convey information.

It's long been my contention that one of the biggest problems with the global warming issue is that CO2 is invisible. I'll bet that if people actually saw giant clouds the color of liquid Barney wafting off the coast every day, then they would be more inclined to think of carbon dioxide as something tangible.

Labels: art, climate change, CO2, global warming, maps

A friend alerted me to this cool blog that showcases weird maps. You gotta check it out. As a geological incentive to visit, here's one of the Mississippi River's shifting meanders through time:

If you don't have time to sift through all of them, a "best of" list of 21 maps is compiled here.

Labels: blogs, maps

A cool feature from Google Maps allows users to create individualized maps with content centered on specific locations. They call them "My Maps." This maps are then viewable in any HTML browser. Check out the "Earth As Art" demonstration map, or this "Oral Histories of Route 66" map for examples of the kind of stuff that you can do with "My Maps." You can also watch the video about how to create them.

It occurs to me that My Maps might be a good way to share geologic knowledge about outcrop locations. One thing that I found frustrating and limiting in my first few years of teaching was that there was no good single source to go to find out about relevant outcrops. It took time and experience to find out where the cool rocks were. Is it a good idea to put this information online in a publicly-accessible format so beginning instructors and interested students/amateurs can visit interesting outcrops? (I sure would have appreciated it four years ago!) Or does that run the risk of letting rockhounds and less-than-ethical geovandals onto previously-secret locations? Is there a benefit to the ancient barriers in outcrop-information flow? Is it better to pass this information on from wise elder to trusted neophyte?

Labels: google, maps, teaching, tech, websites

Starting today, DC police are monitoring live images from surveillance cameras in many parts of the city. The District has 73 cameras, with live feeds from 54. The Washington Post published this map showing where they are (supposedly the locations were chosen in historically high crime areas). They also have an article about the new system. My 'hood of Adams-Morgan gets two, it looks like...

Anyhow, I always love maps, so I thought I'd share this one.

Labels: dc, maps

Labels: google, maps