East Anglia environment in a global context

 This follows on blogposts about East Anglia in general here. The last post on infrastructure affected by sea level rise is here. Contrast below Environment England's Risk of flooding from river and from sea at left for waters coming naturalls from onshore & offsore, and my Seal level rise model by simply intersecting various sea level elevations and Ordnance Survey topogaphy (intro here and workshop here). Think of it below as fresh water largely going NE to the North Sea at left, and at right as sea water encroaching largely SW onto the land:

click to enlarge, original here

Let's talk now about risk of flooding, peatlands and carbon capture in a global context. This comes from a new Esri Living Atlas release of World Resource Institute (WRI) Aqueduct 4.0 here & here (HT Dan Pisut, LinkedIn here).

The local context is Natural England's Natural Capital Atlases: Mapping Indicators for County and City Regions here. Also the index of deprivation and settlement vulnerability to flooding & sea level rise for Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority: based on Environment Agency Survey,  Office for National Statistics Geoportal and Ordnance Survey Open Zoomstack data; detailed in the afore-mentioned last blogpost here. 

click to enlarge, original here

Environment Agency & World Resource Institute

Also detailed in that post is Environment Agency Dec. 2019 Risk of Flooding from River & from Sea. I post it here against WRI Aqueduct 4.0 here: I used Available Blue Water (the total amount of renewable freshwater - surface water and groundwater - available to a sub-basin with upstream consumption removed), & Gross Water Demand (the total water withdrawals across all sectors within a sub-basin, including: domestic, agricultural, industrial, power generation, and livestock).

click to enlarge, original here

The first thing you'll notice is the granularity of the local vs. the global parcelled by hydrologic basin in a consistent framework detailed here. It does however distinguish the Norfolk Suffolk 'uplands' to the southeast with more available water and the lowlands with higher water demand risk. That dividing line largely matches the bisector lines, if you squint at the index of deprivation and settlement vulnerability maps in the intro. 

Natural England and World Resource Institute

I also reviewed peatlands here on how to mitigate GHG emissions (greenhouse gas) by returning peatlands to being carbon sinks rather than emitters at present here (apologies for missing story maps explained per indented paragraph here): 

In East Anglia, peatlands are net carbon emitters having been drained, and work is afoot by local rural conservation efforts such Fens Biosphere, Great Fen and Future Fens, to reflood & make them carbon sinks again.  This helps conservation efforts and fights climate change literally at the grassroots level.

I also looked the Irrecoverable Carbon also from WRI, that was  news to me and explained fully here:

Irreplaceable carbon, also termed irrecoverable carbon, refers to ecosystem carbon stocks vulnerable to human-induced loss that cannot be restored within 30 years, critical for staying within 1.5–2°C warming limits

My curiosity was piqued by University of Cambridge physical geographer Andrew Freund's lectures over 5 yrs. ago, where he quipped in another context here:

It’s known that 1/3 of the sink exists on land, but the mechanisms are not fully understood. It is the sink of anthropogenic carbon emissions, which has to be a combination of the atmosphere, oceans, and land. The land sink helps reduce the long-term (decadal) build up of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere, and thereby mitigates climate change.

 

click to enlarge, original here

 You will see that peatland carbon and irrecoverable carbon distribution are broadly complements, or negative spaces to each other. That underscores my point that peatlands need restoring as part of the areas needing protection in the Nature Sustainability article above:

These risks can be reduced through proactive protection and adaptive management. Currently, 23.0% of irrecoverable carbon is within protected areas and 33.6% is managed by Indigenous peoples and local communities. Half of Earth’s irrecoverable carbon is concentrated on just 3.3% of its land, highlighting opportunities for targeted efforts to increase global climate security.

A Roman Holiday

This follows on a map story here.

Update : check out below how a new map, itiner-e, updated the Roman Roads view.

Update 2: speaking of malaria in second map, appended maps on trade routes that triggered the Black Plague in the 14th c. Mediterranean.

Not William Wilder's 1953 Gregory Peck & Audrey Hepburn flick (Wikipedia)! When drawing up a map of Apostolic Palestine for local Catholics, I ran across Ancient World Mapping Center (AWMC) at UNC-Chapel Hill. While their web app (ArcGIS Online) is a cool one-stop-shop for their rich data set - for ex. I cannot do point clustering (Comet Assistant) with my standard Argis Pro desktop license -  I loaded, picked apart an re-sorted some of their data for some interesting insights. 

AI to recreate a lost picture

This follows on AI "lessons-learned, lessons shared", last post here and master post here.

Here is another use of Google Gemini AI. A LinkedIn discussion here described fog/cloud banks in Cen. & Nor. Cal. against nearby ridges.  I commented on same viz. Yucaipa Valley & Ridge in So. Cal. Here is my comment:

How to build AI Agents

This follows on my AI "lessons-learned,  lessons-shared" mainly on my Ongoing Crash Course here, that links all items on my various socials.

Maryam Maradi (LinkedIn) shared on-going how-to's I pay-forward here to the rest of the world. I posted the texts on the links below her excellent posters also in-text (click to enlarge). My (liked) comment on her second post was:

This is so excellent! I'm a geologist & GIS-er of 40-odd yrs., w interest in geophysics in general & seismic in particular. I have never seen such a comprehensive review and sign of hope for disaster response... Thanks!

... Samurais in early 1600s Spain!

This follows on from a map story here. A follow-on is here.

I thought that So. Cal. Spanish missions were early (mid-18th c.)... well here's an earlier story of intrepid early diplomats & missionaries - not seasoned sailors as Longest tall ships routes here - after long-distance missionaries of the Apostolic Levant here. Perplexity opens here as:

More map art, Part II

This follows on a map story here. The next one is here. 

The original "More map art" is  here: a world map in Natural Earth projection with Mean Annual Climate Temperatures and Natural Earth countries.

Equal Earth vs. Spilhaus projection, masking onshore areas

The original post starts as "a few years ago I used Charlie Frye's online lesson Explore future climate projections to learn how to use NetCDF and map temperature regimes - it's shown below in Patterson & Savaric's Equal Earth Projection..."

2050 Scenario? Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)

This follows on a map story here.  The next one is here.

After revisiting a number of topics for just over a year here, let's address an item of some urgency: stalling the Gulf Stream may end Western Europe's historic privilege; to be a warm enclave between two 'normal' bands at its latitudes. It's not an Ice Age but think how much colder New York and Montreal are than London or Paris. 

It may be hard to wrap our minds around cooling at a time where climate warming hits the headlines - and rightfully so -  and before climate deniers jump on this, please consult the scientific consensus behind all this under two Microsoft Copilot headings at the bottom: AMOC update, a political declaration of Nordic countries affected and estimated timeline of its collapse.

Update: AMOC collapse effect presented at the National Emergency Briefing last week in London here HT YouTube @JustHaveaThink

Longest haul flights, longest rivers, longest tall ships routes & bonus map

This follows on a map story here. The next one is here.

A series of maps are posted here; they're in desktop and map or poster but not web format as explained here & here; sit back folks, relax & enjoy the map story time...

I repost a cool map on long haul flights: I grew up taking earlier ones over 50 yrs. ago; one of the carriers I used, Qantas just announced here jets that can fly Sydney to New York or London direct! Next is a new map of the longest rivers from a website priding itself of its visualisations: I used previous techniques and cannot decide which works best; perhaps you the reader can help?

Update: added a long section on longest sailing routes by 18-19 c. tall ships (think Cutty Sark here).

Update 2: this post here follows on this series of offline maps

Exhuming my thesis, part III

Update 1: follow-on post here on the series revisiting maps or posting off-web.

Update 2: added an intriguing speculation on the adjacent Sudbury Nickel Irruptive

Following on Parts I & II here & here, here is an article on the breakup of Nuna Province in current N China: it gives new impetus to plate tectonics around 1.5GA - see Part II for another example -  such dynamic processes were proposed in my thesis paper over 40 yrs. ago here, where I applied recent plate dynamics to the Proterozoic of Southern Province of N Ontario Canada of similar age and make-up of Nuna Province. I looked at it from a structural geologic perspective, using intrusives cross-cutting relationships as date markers. The new paper actually dated similar intrusives in present day N China.

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 map story here. The next one is here.