Note: this blog won't die... monthly hits almost 20K mid-April! Seen on desktop here, that also lists top reads.
When visiting the nearby village of Pontacq (Flickr & village site), the glorious sunshine showed the Pic do Midi de Bigorre (Wikipedia) so clearly we could see the observatory atop! It's the left peak in the central massif below.
Update1: see clipped oroginal and working vector datasets posted as detailed at bottom.
Update 2: added DIY map-mapping workshops & notes to help citzen science
Update 3: here at the end is the relevance of this sort of effort in a broader context
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).
Update: see aerial shots from 1968 posted on Facebook Group "Remembering the Franklin Expedition" here
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!
Update 1: here is the transcript of Hansen's latest "in plain English" (alt. here)
Update 2: here is the Climate Cultures article this map was used in, thanks Lola Perrin.
Update 3: here at the end is the relevance of this sort of effort in a broader context
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).
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.
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.
By the way, "exhuming my thesis" was an inside joke: the geology and tectonics both in my area in N Ontario and the inspiration paper in Alaska talked about "exhumed terranes"; continental blocks that were buried and metamorphosed, displaced and then exhumed back to the surface to their current location.
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.
Update: see here papers a decade later that point also to precambrian terranes.
My 1982 M.Sc. thesis, Regional cross section of the Southern Province adjacent to Lake Huron, Ontario: implications for the tectonic significance of the Murray Fault Zone (ResearchGate) proposed a plate-tectonic (Wikipedia) setting around 1.9 billion years ago, in the Proterozoic (late Pre-Cambrian). I presumed there was another buried land mass south of what I called the Manitoulin Island Discontinuity. While plate tectonics was well established in the later Phanerozoic (Wikipedia) record, it took a lot longer to be accepted earlier in the geologic time scale with lot scanter rock record to go by (more at the bottom).
Five friends at Arts & Metiers engineering school in Paris took a ten month leave to sail around the North Atlantic: Lez'Arts Marins (here) sail south from Britanny past the Azores & Madeira to Senegal for a moth humanitarian aid project, west across to Martinique and northeast N of Scotland to Scandinavia and back.
An update to a Northwest Passage blogpost posted to the Facebook Rememberig Frankline Expedition group, elicited a response from @aaron.spitzer. I post his comment below, which I thanked him for citing the fact my stories were from conversations that weren't fact-checked. That in turn got me to fact-check another story from the same 1986 summer in the Arctic Islands from my now-defunct original website reposted at bottom.
Almost four years ago, a story map here showed the Skelworth Fold area of the Lake District for a friend, using advanced mapping and Environment Agency digital elevation.
Update 2: see here an update on Beechey Isl. site discovered the year before my visit below
Update 1: right on cue, a photo exhibit on Arctic Life and Climate Change in Budapest HU on Euronews.
Here is an old webpage from 1996 I had to retire a couple years ago. It smacks of urban legend, had I not been told by airport staff in Resolute on Cornwallis Isl., the Arctic Canadian hub (read on):
Update: see @ bottom example of a Cyclone (Wikipedia) as they're called in the So. Hemisphere.
Further to our explorations in AI here and to the previous post here, this is a 'conversation' with Copilot, Microsoft Bing's AI extension. Conversation means that you can daisy-chain questions without repeating them, either to extend or to zero in:
Update: so follow-on here with definions and relationsips among these topics
I posted here 3 yrs. ago among a series of DIY map notes to encourage Citizen Science, how to use NOAA global digital elevation data to model sea level rise data on straight geometry. See also here for an explanation referring to East Anglia. Here is what it looks like from the DIY document:
I posted a decade ago here re: creating dynamic maps where my travels can show on video. I have since improved on the original Mercator maps that smear out the poles and make N Hemisphere land mass look a lot bigger than it really is.
Mercator projection (Wikipedia) started with mariners, whose maps allowed to plot sailings in straight lines. It was later kept by Colonialist Europe and Cold War North America, because it increased the size of colonizers and reduced that of the colonies, or conversely made the Soviet Union look bigger & more threatening.
Update: a post in SciTech Daily shows that ocean atmospheric science - shown in this and previous post - is alive and may help with assessing climate change: it's about the doldrums driven by downdrafts not updrafts; at a localized scale, downdrafts were dramatically reported in passenger flight incidents here or the sinking off Sicily of a superyacht here, and updrafts in increasing mid-Atlantic hurricane generation here.
Updates: mapping climate data from historic ships & global harmonization follow respectively here & here.
"You can get Andrew outa maps, but you can't get maps outa Andrew" quipped a GIS map friend when I left Kuwait a dozen years ago... Well after quitting socials, Esri(UK) graciously helped me recover my desktop app. While I lost my story maps and web maps content, I maintained a free dev account - story maps and maps&data - this was chiefly to preserve my Living Atlas content inspired by John Nelson.
