Arctic Dreams, Part II

As the Arctic comes under more scrutiny in the news, I'm reminded of my visit up there 25 years ago when we actually thought of global cooling! But the issues of access and exploitation are certainly not new... And I posted a few polar maps for fun here and here, though the best rendition can be found here.

More temporal web maps

Here is last year's Fenlands mashup on 2nd gen. beta GisCloud.com (this data is also posted on the UK academic ShareGeo site and the data.gov.uk apps site):

Critical mass, satellite imagery and GIS

Satellite imagery has been around for almost as long as GIS, and the following may just make them so easy they finally gain momentum. The same way Jeeps and Suburbans had been around for a couple of generations, but only the last generation saw Ford legitimize SUVs with its Explorer.

Who said history or surveying had to be boring?

My friend Brent Jones' video is worth watching only for his tongue-in-cheek humour. I thought only Cambridge dons remembered that Newton deemed longitudes NOT calculable! But then along came that clockmaker Harrison, the tinkerer who beat the thinker, as accurate watches made longitudinal calculations possible.

Another Take on Climate Change, Part IV

[Update: Part V, more on polar wanderings]

From guardian.co.uk today: Goce satellite maps the Earth's gravity in unprecedented precision. Aside from updating on Part III of this series, this slots right into my comment on the lesser-know fact that the earth wobbles on it axis, and that mass plate-tectonic movements are the result as well as the cause of earth tremors along plate boundaries

"... with a little help from my friends"

On my 100th posting last week I found some interesting statistics. I use Google's Blogger for its sheer simplicity. And I just found out it offers stats and maps helping track readers.

Another Take on Climate Change, Part III

[Update: Part IV, more on mapping earth gravity]

The time-space map I looked for in Part II is on esri.com... among many others for certes! Note on the map below that the oceanic trenches indeed lie slightly outboard of the Pacific plate boundaries: as suggested earlier the epicenters are at the prow of the major bend in said boundaries; the shift in landmass, however, renders that link even more graphical.

The stunning beauty of Maps, part III

History and current events are a great opportunity for GIS as they allow to disseminate pertinent information fast to those who need it. They bring out the best in map-making I posted here and here already. Not a few websites posted maps on the Japanese catastrophe, here are those I found from watching Al-Jazeera and my favourite blogs.
NOAA tsunami map (I already posted it for Chilean quake exactly a year ago):

Another Take on Climate Change, Part II

[Update 2: thanks Greg Cocks for this April 2019 update
Update 1: Part III, more on plate boundary earthquakes]

A year ago today I posted here on the Chilean 8.8 magnitude earthquake.... The recent earhtquakes and tsunamis in Japan and New Zealand, and China and Indonesia before that, truly indicate an increased rate of incidence in these catastrophies! Add to that the more frequent hurricanes and cyclones off the Gulf of Mexico and NE Australia, and fires or floods in N America, Australia and Europe, and we truly wonder what is going on really?

Google Fusion Tables for Current Affairs

[Update: I noted on many of my Google Fusion Table posts that, while the data are still on Google Drive for you to view, GFT no longer offers a polygon or heatmap option, only geocoding by country centroid in its new version. Not sure why, but on this, this, this, and another  example posted as Iframes not Scripts preserved the old GFT maps.]

Wolfram Alpha is a search tool that does statistical as well as word searches. This is powerful indeed as it allows to query across diciplines, subjects and techniques. I live in Kuwait now, and the current events made me curious about the distribution of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Having already used Google Docs and Fusion Tables here and here, I performed the following: