Let me highlight the importance of the recent topic of AI my Community Interest Company delved into and I used in various forms shared in the last post here. Open this blog's desktop version here, look at the stats at its right... and you'll see why the curve below spikes at far right here!
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| click to enlarge, original here |
Update 2: added a new map post here in my ongoing series of revisiting here
Update 1: added at bottom a new map adding to an existing Antarctic project
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.
As I prepare to end this blog, let's follow on recent updates:
Aug. '24: A return to my roots
Oct. '24: "Where in the world...", updated
Oct. '24: Global sea level rise revisited
Oct. '24: Northwest Passage Reloaded
Nov. '24: Cumbria classic revisited...
Dec. '24: Exhuming my thesis area... & Jan. '25: update
Jan. '25: London Thames Barrier... & Feb. '25: update
Feb. '25: Beechey Island update
Feb. '25: East Anglia Peatlands revisited
Update: a short read on Medium tells "the story behind the story" of American & French Revolutions.
Shakira YouTube channel posted this video #LMYNLWorldTourCDMX:
How a confusion between CDMX (Ciudad Mexico) and MCDX (1410 in Roman numerals) lead to a far-ranging AI chat thru culture, geography, career and climate activism. MSFT Copilot (here) transcript (Italics: me, regular: Copilot):
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
Update 4: worrying revisit of peatlands degradation with increased drought & extreme weather here: increased heat degraded carbon absorption, and that is mirrored in tropical forests turning into carbon emitters seen here
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This follows on previous Peatlands blog posting here, last of the Community Engagement Series.
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: re: my last paragraph, I restored my personal portfolio as a re-post of my original www.zolnai.ca here and my professional portfolio as a free-tier for developers here.
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.
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: further confirmation of ancient plate tectonics in Part III here
Update: an article here confirms plate tectonics 1.1-1.3 B yrs. ago, where plate movements helped concentrate the iron ore.
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.
