World

Marine chokepoints: GIS analysis of shipping routes and trade data identify critical marine shipping chokepoints. “Cargo ships are estimated to move 80% of all international trade by volume and over 70% by value”.

Drought, Attila the Hun, and the fall of Rome. I like this (not so recent) trend of looking at History and Geography with a more focused lens of climate change. Seems our current predicament is shining some academic illumination. This is a nice deep dive into the Huns.

Bronze Age Tin trade routes identified from Uzbekistan to the Mediterranean.

Regional Geography homework. The Caucasus region. Also, when are we planning our Trans-Caucasian hike?

Europe

Bloomberg has an occasional series on the New Geography of Technology. There are links in the article below to other stories in that series. This one is about ASML, a chip industry company in Veldhoven, Netherlands, and new pushback it’s getting from locals on expansion.

Interesting video on the ripple effects on demographics from war. Ukraine and Russia are in the 3rd generation echo from the WWII loss of males. Precisely at the time of this new war, plus the impacts from the pandemic. The negative demographic impact on multiple generations will be profound for both countries.

USA

Scanning Big Basin Redwood State Park. Post fire.

Ice age footprints. The carbon dating on these footprints will re-write the archeological textbooks in the Americas. And the techniques pioneered here will widen to other places, primarily in the Great Basin. Hopefully Bob and I can find some new tracks too in some of our local Pleistocene lake beds. It needs just the right mineral and chemical composition for preservation though.