East Anglia Peatlands revisited

Update: see vector datasets posted on G-Drive detailed at bottom.

As news abounds about Arctic Permafrost & Peatlands degrading faster than thought (Copilot), this may be a good time to bring back some Natural England and Environment Agency data under Open Government License (OGL, National Archives). The upshot is that returning peatlands to their original state is the biggest climate change mitigator in the UK detailed here & here: briefly, peatlands either degraded thru neglect or converted to farm land, not only shrinks & stops being floodwater catchment, but it converts carbon sinks through sphagnum moss into carbon emitters thru windborne dried peat. In other words, re-watering peatlands dwarf efforts from other mitigation of climate change (see sources at bottom).

Most of my Story Maps and Web Maps were lost, when I couldn't keep them on arcgis.com. That was because the significant amount of open data needed to be reposted, after cleaning it up as discussed at bottom here. That simply exceeded my volunteered geographer (VGI, Wikipedia) budget.

 Also stopped posting megadata on Amazon Web Services (AWS, blog), as even 'tiny AWS instance' hosting cost exceeded VGI budgets. 

As in my previous post on a very specific subject, I resorted to QGIS & QGIScloud to host datasets for free under 50 Mb. Intricate datasets described above, totalled 250Mb in vector format are best for GIS study (send comment below if interested). But the same, rasterized to the data resolution of 50 m., take an order of magnitude lass space: that tucks them in under the free-tier cloud hosting limit. 

(full screen here, "Easr_Anglia_Environ_web4" is a typo but is correct)

This is the result, with full Natural England documentation and shape files posted here and  here respectively: all work is CC BY-SA 4.0 as per my blog footer; it's derived under Open Government License as atop this post. Again, please post questions in the Comment Section below.

Data

Raster data posted above were derived from vector data that exceeded the free tier as explained. The full vector datasets are stored here as shape files, and here a Esri map package* and QGIS geopackage together with Natural England PDF documentation.

*: Esri original includes bivariate posting of GHG (greenhouse gas) flux and total carbon, in addition to the full complement  of Natural England (NE) and Environment Agency (EA) data, all under OGL mentioned atop, and derivation CC BY-SA 4.O here.

 

Beechey Island update

 A previous blogpost here almost 7 years ago showed how to use a niche product to create detailed elevation model of Beechey Island. Posted on Google Earth here (download & open it in Google Earth, see 'GE' below), it allowed to add a Parks Canada photo of the Franklin Expedition landing site: it was the first one uncovered by University of Alberta's Owen Beatty in 1984, the year before I spent a summer in the Arctic 'nearby' the other side of King William Isl. on the west shore mid-Boothia Peninsula... We were in fact told to report any unusual findings!

London Thames Barrier update

Update: here is the transcript of Hansen's latest "in plain English" (here if PDF download fails)

Two weeks ago I recreated Sea Level Rise (SLR) and Risk of Flooding (RoF) maps for the lower Thames River near the Thames Barrier (blog) for a WhatsApp Group considering the future of its ageing infrastructure w.r.t. recent climate extremes. This week came a global and urgent update affecting Sea Level Rise, by James Hansen who sounded the alarm ~ 35 yrs ago (go to 1981 & 1988 in Medium): a paper incl. supplementary materials "Global Warming Has Accelerated" (Columbia) c/w companion webinar (Columbia).

A brief web history of mine

As I wind down my blog posts and I quit socials, perhaps this may be a good time to reflect on my Web journey that started almost 40 years ago (a recap of my IT journey is here)...

But wait... Tim Berners-Lee didn't invent it til just over 35 years ago (Wikipedia)! That's because I had a site dubbed HTTP in 1986, see inset below:  "world wide web" hadn't been coined yet, but I knew as a student at late 70's University of Calgary of Ted Nelson's failed Project Xanadu (Wikipedia), to try and link all forms of knowledge via hypertext; it failed partly due to Nelson's eccentricity,  partly because there was no global network to carry it. 

London Thames Barrier revisited

Update 2: see renewed Sea-level Rise extents according to new information here 

Update 1: see addition at bottom... thanks to our indefatigable London climate activists!

Further to my original blog post 3½ yrs. ago here, I was asked to share maps of the area surrounding the Thames Barrier (Wikipedia): A WhatsApp group considered the necessity for a second barrier under Climate Change that increases both flooding and sea level seasonal elevations. 

Exhuming my thesis ... an update

Update 2:  ... aaaand I didn't plan on having yet another one here!

Update 1: this is my last post as I move on. Didn't plan it that way, but ending where I began  _is_ satisfying.

New Years Eve 2000 racing by Greenwich Meridian

Update: note a dash of AI mixed in at the bottom for fun

Our TV rung in 2025 live in Paris in my time zone, and six hours later in NYC dropping its ball in Times Square; nothing matches however this cracking event in London to usher in the New Millennium: barges were aligned in the middle of the River Thames, spaced exactly 1 s. apart as the earth rotated past midnight GMT in London, from the Meridian at the Millennium Dome to the east, to Vauxhall Bridge to the west.