All issues can be found at: https://geocraic.com/

Happy 2024!

World

How crowded are the oceans? New maps show what flew under the radar until now

Climate change

2023 Warmest on record. I’m sure you all are well aware 2023 is the warmest on record but the NYT generally comes through with good graphics and that’s the case here.

A satirical 2015 poster by Barnbrook, put up in bus stops in Paris during the COP21 summit. The text refers to Volkswagen’s emissions cheating scandal and attempts by the carmaker to apologize. Credit via Poster House.

Asia

Silk Road

A great new interactive map of the Silk Roads.

South America

Brazil

FOSS4G is in Belem in December of 2024. I’m thinking about going. I’ve wanted to see Belem in particular and go to the market there to see what the Amazon provides. I was first inspired by an Anthony Bourdain episode that started in Belem. The market looks amazing. Then a Netflix Chef’s Table episode with Alex Atala. Maybe a FOSS4G meeting is a good reason to go - and a tax write-off. Who wants to join me?

Ecuador

Human Diffusion

Huge ancient city found in the Amazon via LIDAR. Comparable in size to Mayan sites. Jungle cities found via LIDAR are just at the beginning of a new relatively new trend as the technology gets cheaper and easier to deploy. Built 2,500 years ago and lived in for up to 1,000 years. Population was in the 10K to 100K range, so it was enormous with a large network of roads and canals.

Book Recommendation related to Amazonian pre-historic populations. Maybe it’s time we believed Francisco Orellan’s account of traversing the Amazon in 1541. River of Darkness

Australia

Ancient Indigenous ‘Songlines’ Match Long-Sunken Landscape off Australia. Interesting article about a match between an archeological investigation and an indigenous Australian “Songline”. I’ve seen other matches too, like with indigenous groups who have lived for tens of thousands of years near the Great Barrier Reef who have stories about sea-level rise from the end of the last glaciation. Which matches the age dates of the Great Barrier Reef growth. Fascinating stuff and worth a lot more investigation. Indigenous stories have been discounted and ignored for too long when they can be not only a confirmation source for other evidence but a rich connection to humans at those timespans. I want to learn about those connections in regards to the Mazama eruption in Oregon, or the Columbian Floods in Washington. What are the human stories that go with those events?

Scandanavia

I like Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning Substack newsletter. He’s a really good and prolific writer on the human diffusion using genetic data.

US

PNW

BioGeography

Coast Salish Wooly Dogs Very interesting article about the extinct species of dog that was kept by the Salish peoples of the Northwest. They were specifically used for their fur, and sheared like sheep.

Beavers. Nature’s best rewilding engineers.