Is reaching this milestone not fitting on the blogs 15th anniversary? The 20th anniversary of my return from the US, 2 mo. to the 50th of originally emigrating to Canada, & 6 mo. to the 40th of my original post pre-internet: see 1986, curr. Internet footprint, banner menu of this blog's web view.
As cumulative hits exceed the million mark, let's update the last recap here.
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This follows on "Ancient Roman environment" paragraph halfway down here: the blog post about the Roman road network ended up observing the vastly different water regime in ancient Mesopotamia.
Update: I renamed the blogpost to add a second map of Marcus Aurelius along the Danube, see also the footnote.
Fox News Digital ran a feature titled Alexander the Great's long-lost city located after nearly two millennia: ‘Absolutely stunning’ about Alexandria-on-the-Tigris (Charax Spasinou, summary at bottom). That falls smack dab in the middle of that map region. I simply recycled the previous map with Ancient World Mapping Center (AWMC) at UNC-Chapel Hill data for that period.
A funny thing happened when I showed my last blog post to my mom: "what is that blob right above where it says 'Atlantic Ocean'?". Widow and mother to geologists, she learned to read maps: she spotted the Rockhall Rise as it shows in the zoomed-in view below; it's also known as Rockhall Plateau (Perplexity), briefly a piece of crust left behind in the spreading of the North Atlantic. The tectonic plate margins, incl. the mid-Atlantic Ridge top right, are highlighted in cyan below. Same as the second-last blogpost showed interesting geomorphology only seen in North polar view, this portion of the far North Atlantic also shows better than in a normal or equatorial map view shown at right.
This follows on the original post here, with more news on "Arctic fires" that are counterintuitive a priori:
Perplexity summary of NASA captured it from space, and it looks like a bad joke: fire burning on the ice of the North Pole. The scary thing is that it has been multiplying for 10 years: NASA satellites have detected a dramatic rise in Arctic wildfires over the past decade, with fires spreading farther north into icy regions, fuelled by an Arctic warming four times faster than the global average. These blazes, now more frequent and intense, are shifting from the Arctic's edges to a broad northern band, burning drier tundra and releasing ancient carbon from permafrost, turning some areas into carbon sources. Lightning ignites many of these deep-burning fires, whose smoke travels globally, worsening air quality and signalling urgent climate impacts as noted in recent Arctic assessments.
This follows on from 3D maps in current affairs: it showed an intriguing feature bisecting the Arctic on a proxy topography for the earth's crust; it's only visible on a Polar Stereographic projection, looking straight down the North Pole, mapped here for features N of 50° N lat.
This was seen when mapping ArcticDEM - High-resolution Elevation Models of the Arctic (Esri Living Atlas) and Seabed Sediment Thickness (clipped to N of 50°N, Esri Living Atlas). From the poster & overlay at the bottom:
