Tag: Geography
Geologists collect earthquake data every day. What are the patterns of earthquake magnitude, depth, location, and frequency? What are the patterns of earthquakes along plate boundaries?
Click the play button to see the earthquakes. You can drag the starting time to start playing earthquakes from a later date.
Source: Seismic Explorer
via Kottke
On that return trip, “I measured the temperature of seeps all over, wherever I could,” he says. The closer to the surface he measured, the warmer the water was. In 2008, a separate team from the University of Minnesota had [predicted](https://conservancy.umn.edu/items/a9ae3228-1d09-4dd9-8bd2-8f63e23e000c) that heat from Minneapolis’s urban surface was conducting itself deep underground, heating the groundwater there like a metropolitan microwave. Brick’s subsequent research proved them right—but also showed that they had significantly underestimated the extent of the warming.
Brick published his results in 2022, as a chapter in [_Threats to Springs in a Changing World_](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781119818625), published by the American Geophysical Union. His findings aren’t unique to Minneapolis. From Japan to Italy, Canada to Switzerland, scientists have found other “subsurface urban heat islands” where pavement and basements warm up what’s below them.
The Strange Heat Island Lurking Beneath Minneapolis by Sarah Scoles
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North Americans tend to assume the Pan-American Highway was completed, that you can drive from North America down through the narrowing isthmus of Central America into South America. Try it, though, and you’ll dead-end in Panama.
A map of the Darien Gap via Wikimedia Commons
The border between Panama and Columbia is where the dream faltered. A route through El Tapón Darién, the Darién Gap, was never cleared and paved. To this day, writes Miller, “Panama and Colombia are the only neighboring nations on the globe without a single road link of even the most primitive kind.”
Matthew Wills discusses the history of the Pan-American Highway and inability to mark a path through the Darién Gap. For more on the Darién Gap, Jason Motlagh documents his experience of passing through the region.
Beau Miles traverses the Cook River in Sydney, providing an insight into the health of our urban rivers. One of the problems that he highlights is the way in which waterways are replaced with concrete. As Miles mentions, there have been projects to reclaim some such waterways, such as Moonee Ponds Creek.
On a similar note, Katerine Rapin discusses efforts to reclaim rivers using oysters and grasses.
Prettymapp is a webapp to create beautiful maps from OpenStreetMap data (based on prettymaps)
After more than a century, a proud country football and netball club is folding. Its demise tells a bigger story about rural Australia.
I remember going for a job a few years ago at Manangatang, further north of Quambatook. The principal spoke about the changes to the land. I wonder what the long term impact will be for these areas.
We’ve monocropped streets — so they’re used almost exclusively for cars. Time to rewild
Inspired by Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet’s discussion of banning cars in cities, Clive Thompson thinks about the idea of monocropping and the impact of rewilding beyond just nature.
In the same way that monocropping corn creates weaker, less resilient land, monocropping our streets with cars creates cities that aren’t as vibrant as they ought to be. We often don’t notice it, because we’ve trained ourselves to think of streets as “almost exclusively for cars”. But if you think of all the things you could do with streets, you realize how weird it is that we have, for decades now, used them mostly only for vehicles.
This reminds me of a piece that I wrote a few years ago about ‘rewilding education‘. Also, the suggestion of replacing roads had me thinking about the scene in Babakiueria where they propose replacing the freeway, a ‘baron wasteland’, with bushland. Of course, this is really a comical reference to the tendency to build on top of existing sacred sites.
A long history of constraining the river through levees has led to massive land loss in its delta. Can people engineer a way out?
Boyce Upholt explores the engineering nature and the challenges with reversing the side-effects. Whereas in the past, water associated with the Mississippi would flow out through the delta, dumping sediment and building up the land. Nowadays it all flows through a single channel. Every choice associated with fixing this problem has its own environmental and economic consequences.
“There’s not a son of a bitch in this parish, or within this industry, that doesn’t want coastal restoration,” Acy Cooper, the president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association tells me when I find him repairing his boat in Venice, the southernmost harbor on the Mississippi River. Cooper is a third-generation shrimper; he knows that if the marshland is not saved, that chain will come to an end. The necessary gradient of water will disappear, replaced by salty ocean. So Cooper supports some projects—using dredged mud to build marsh, for instance—but worries that the diversion will make the water near Venice too fresh, pushing shrimp out into the Gulf. The small boats used by many shrimpers can’t travel that far. He compares the diversion to a gun held to his head: “Either let me die slowly and I can adapt, or you just pull the trigger and kill me now. That’s the way I feel about it,” he says. “If you pull the trigger now, I’m dead.”
The Army Corps’ draft environmental impact statement, released in spring 2021, confirmed many of Cooper’s worst fears: the blast of fresh water will have “major, permanent, adverse impacts on brown shrimp abundance.” Oysters will suffer, too. Tidal flooding will increase near homes in Myrtle Grove and other marshland communities, while the canals that residents use to travel to their favored fishing sites will become plugged with mud.
This is something captured by Elena Lazos-Chavero and her research team in their research into the act of reforestisation.
Lazos-Chavero’s team concludes, “All reforestation interventions are entangled in social and political structures… The effects of dynamism on trade-offs and synergies for these and various other stakeholders should be considered in planning phases and reevaluated throughout a reforestation effort.”
A very detailed coloured lithograph by De Gruchy and Leigh of an aerial view of Melbourne in 1866 looking south from a point approximately above the corner of Victoria and Spring Streets. The picture extends from Yarra Park in the east to Batman’s Hill in the west and from Albert and Lonsdale Streets in the north to Port Philip Bay in the south.
This aerial view of Melbourne in 1866 is fascinating, not only for what it shows, but also to consider how it was actually constructed. Was it using a hot air balloon or was it simply based on De Gruchy and Leigh’s appreciation of the land?
Elucidating the Eleusinian Mysteries is one small element in Scott Reynolds Nelson’s new book, Oceans of Grain. It looks at the many, many ways in which wheat and human history intertwine.
Jeremy Cherfas speaks with Scott Reynolds Nelson about his book Oceans of Grain. The conversations are broken up into the themes of transport, finance and empire. This series of conversations is not so much a history of wheat, but rather a history through wheat. It is fascinating to consider the impact that grain has had on so many significant historical events. I remember hearing Marilyn Lake talk about having a global perspective, this is a great example of this.
A mini-forest is a small ecologically robust forest that can be planted by communities in parks and cities, in schoolyards and churchyards, and beside busy roads. It’s flipped traditional landscaping on its head. You get more biodiversity and a different appearance. It’s a dense band of multi-layer trees as opposed to the elegant but less ecologically useful line of single species down the side of the street.
Tara Yarlagadda interviews Hannah Lewis about her book Mini-Forest Revolution which explores the use of the Miyawaki method to rewild the world.
I am always fascinated about the idea of ‘rewilding’. It is intriguing to think what difference it would make to turn fields of grass that fill many of the city parks in Melbourne with thick forests of native trees? Although I am not sure I want apex preditors with such rewilding. This all has me thinking a bit differently about just planting trees to hold back a desert.
The last surviving member of a species—the individual whose death brings extinction—is called an endling. Those individuals can sometimes be identified, even named. Many more of them live and die unseen. For example, archaeological evidence shows that the woolly mammoth endling lived about 4,000 years ago on Wrangel Island, 87 miles off the coast of Siberia. Mammoths survived there for millennia after the rest of their kind were wiped out by changing climate and human hunters. But eventually, through some combination of factors, including extreme weather events and harmful mutations acquired through heavy inbreeding, they also perished. I thought about them as I listened to Kristin Laidre talking about polar bears.
Beasley said five years ago around 80 million people were “marching toward starvation” that number nearly doubled during COVID now the number of people facing critical food shortage has doubled again to over 270 million and tens of millions are facing famine.
It all puts our own travails in Australia into perspective. We may complain about a shortage of lettuce and having to make do with cabbage on our burgers, but we are not starving.
Stan Grant really puts the crisis on lettuce in perspective, highlighting that there are far worse things to be worrying about, such as political unrest, inflation and starvation.
Bob Marley warned that “them belly full, but we hungry”, the poet William Blake cast it in even more apocalyptic terms: “A dog starved at his master’s gate predicts the ruin of the state.”
I remember depending on books for information on walks and hikes … I really need to get out more.
Stopping an invasion before it begins seems to be the best form of mitigation, but is it impossible? Everywhere humans have stepped foot, we’ve carried aliens with us. The Antarctic is a special place with formidable barriers, but it isn’t immune.
“We’ve been lucky so far,” says Bergstrom, the ecologist from the Australian Antarctic Division. “But it won’t stay that way.”
While no solution is a panacea, I believe that some of the components of a new global food system – one that is more resilient, more distributed, more diverse and more sustainable – are falling into place. If it happens, it will be built on our new knowledge of the most neglected of major ecosystems: the soil. It could resolve the greatest of all dilemmas: how to feed ourselves without destroying the living systems on which we depend. The future is underground.
In an extract from Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet, George Monbiot discusses the world beneath our feet and the possible futures for farming. He talks about the paradoxical effect of fertilising to maximise growth in regards to quality of soils.
Soil is fractally scaled, which means its structure is consistent, regardless of magnification. Bacteria, fungi, plants and soil animals, working unconsciously together, build an immeasurably intricate, endlessly ramifying architecture that, like Dust in a Philip Pullman novel, organises itself spontaneously into coherent worlds. This biological structure helps to explain soil’s resistance to droughts and floods: if it were just a heap of matter, it would be swept away.
It also reveals why soil can break down so quickly when it’s farmed. Under certain conditions, when farmers apply nitrogen fertiliser, the microbes respond by burning through the carbon: in other words, the cement that holds their catacombs together. The pores cave in. The passages collapse. The soil becomes sodden, airless and compacted.
Associated with this, Monbiot speaks with those farmers responding to the challenges of global warming and soil erosion by walking away from fertilisers and annuals and instead returning to nature and perenials. For example, Iain Tolhurst has developed what he calls ‘stockfree organic’, a trial and error method of mixing different plants to maintain the nutrients and soil fertility.
Tolly’s success forces us to consider what fertility means. It’s not just about the amount of nutrients the soil contains. It’s also a function of whether they’re available to plants at the right moments, and safely immobilised when plants don’t need them. In a healthy soil, crops can regulate their relationships with bacteria in the rhizosphere, ensuring that nutrients are unlocked only when they’re required. In other words, fertility is a property of a functioning ecosystem. Farm science has devoted plenty of attention to soil chemistry. But the more we understand, the more important the biology appears to be.
Monbiot also discusses this on the Today In Focus podcast, which includes further elaboration on precision fermentation, the production of protein and fat in breweries from soil bacteria, fed on water, hydrogen, CO2 and minerals.
This reminds me of discussions of permaculture and the act of letting nature do its thing. I guess it also offers the next step.
From an aircraft, a lidar system fires down a grid of infrared beams, hundreds of thousands per second, and when each beam strikes something on the Earth’s surface it bounces back with a measure of distance. This produces an enormous cloud of data points, which can be fed into computer software that creates high resolution images in which scientists can digitally deforest the Amazon. By scrubbing away trees the maps reveal the Earth’s surface and the archaeological features on it. In this case, the images clearly showed 26 unique sites, including 11 that were previously unknown.
There is something odd and poetic to me about the idea of ‘scientists digitally deforesting the Amazon’.
Wildlife epidemics are becoming more common. In 2015, a bacterial infection wiped out two-thirds of the world’s saiga, a big-nosed Asian antelope. An unknown epidemic killed songbirds across the eastern and midwestern United States last year. The fungus that causes white-nose syndrome is hammering North American bats. Contagious cancers are killing Tasmanian devils. In a few cases, the ripple effects of these diseases are clear. In 2013, a mystery illness disintegrated the starfish of America’s Western Seaboard: These unlikely predators are the coastal equivalent of pumas, and in their absence, their sea-urchin prey were free to devour offshore kelp forests. A deadly fungus that humans inadvertently carried around the world has ravaged the planet’s amphibians, wiping out 90 species and leaving more than 100 others close to extinction; the snakes that eat those amphibians have also dwindled.
After almost 150 years of exploration and research we understand the sea is deep, dark and definitely different – the earth’s last great frontier perhaps – but how much do we know of what’s beneath the surface?
Kerry Howell discusses the history associated with mapping our oceans. From the original Challenger expedition which used dredges, to survey to modern day submersibles, which use sonar, video and machine learning which to slowly build a clearer picture. Responding to the question of deep-sea mining, Howell argues that we should not engage in such practices until we have a better understanding of the world below.