Wednesday, 15 October 2025

More maps, in 3D now

Update 2: found a textbook example of  "carving upstream" in this gorgeous video of the Uinta Mountains of Wyoming

Update 1: more offshore canyons crowning Antarctica found with new digital terrain data and give us a beautiful map @ bottom

This follows on the previous post here of an ongoing series of maps created for outlets that aren't necessarily on the web  - see label:revisit here and label:3D here - this is partly because I'm disengaging from socials; and that itself was partly because I had to let go of significant chunk of work on the internet for lack of resources (see §2 here). See my remaining web presence in the banner menu of the web view here.

Sunday, 5 October 2025

My web footprint

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!

click to enlarge, original here

Friday, 4 April 2025

Another map request

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

Pyrénées

When visiting the nearby village of Pontacq (Flickrvillage 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.

Monday, 24 March 2025

A conversation with AI (long read)

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):

Saturday, 22 February 2025

East Anglia Peatlands revisited

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 3here 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

***

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).

Wednesday, 12 February 2025

Beechey Island update

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!

Wednesday, 5 February 2025

London Thames Barrier update

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).

Thursday, 30 January 2025

A brief web history of mine

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. 

Tuesday, 21 January 2025

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.