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World and Solar System

Mars

Name the pulp fiction author who wrote this series. And you can swing from the vines! But not on the planet in this series. That's another one. (Image credit: Saga Books)


Barsoom!

If you get that reference you are a pulp fan. NPR story on training an AI on the Grand Canyon to help us learn more about the Martian Grand Canyon.

Tech

What’s new in Apple Maps

Hiking! Apple is now competing with the many hiking apps on iOS. Customize your topo maps.

Earth Copilot

NASA has an “Earth Copilot” using Microsft (and ChatGPT) AI.

Niantic Labs GeoSpatial Platform Some very interesting things are happening at Niantic Labs. Which spun out of Google and is probably most famous for it’s Pokeman Go AR game. They’ve got a new product called the Scaniverse for scanning 3D artifacts and placing them in-situ in the real world.

Foursquare Open Places

Foursquare has released a new POI dataset. There was quite a bit of excitement about this initially but I’ve seen subsequent reviews that it’s a crapton of crappy data with virtually no data cleaning (e.g. lots of swear word places, dupes, etc…). So caveat usor.

Mapping Podcasts

Many topics are strongly associated with a single category. However, a number of topics such as “Black, Lives, Matter”, and “Life, Success, Goals” cut across categories. Here, this is depicted using a sample of 25K episodes, colored by category, and projected using t-SNE on episodes’ topic distributions to visualize topical distance, with select topic clusters annotated using the top words in the corresponding topic. (Source: arXiv paper below)


The first large scale analysis of podcasts include some interesting topical and shared-guest maps.

Global

Migration

Migratory Birds Use Magnetic Field

Migratory birds using magnetic field has long been speculated. Now it’s shown that magnetic declination and inclination are used for route finding on the migratory journeys. This article illustrates an interesting experiments to test this.

Epic Whale Migration

A documented case of a 13,000 km humpback whale migration from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean.

Animal Migration Visualization

Animated animal migration map from The Nature Conservancy


Great map that visually illustrates animal migration.

  • LinkedIn Post:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/oliver-bolton_climate-migration-nature-activity-7259852080075489280-3hWS

Tracking Elephants

Mapscaping is a great geo podcast. I highly recommend it. This episode is on tracking Elephant migration and it’s very interesting. I use Overcast for my podcasts but you can find it in your favorite podcast player.

Global Invasive Species

We were in Australia, seeing plenty of evidence of non-native invasive species, and I came across a very interesting database of invasive species. The Global Invasive Species Database. Check it out.

GBIF | Global Biodiversity Information Facility

Let’s flip the coin and go from invasive species to biodiversity. Here’s an awesome resource for any geographer.

GBIF—the Global Biodiversity Information Facility—is an international network and data infrastructure funded by the world’s governments and aimed at providing anyone, anywhere, open access to data about all types of life on Earth.

Rising Continents

An interesting aspect of plate tectonics, explained.

Economic Geography

Atlas of Finance: Mapping the Global Story of Money

New Atlas on the global story of money by Dariusz Wojcik. It looks awesome. I haven’t finished it yet but if you want to take a peek, come on over. It’s got a lot of content, in addition to the great maps.

Climate

Climate Bombs

Bombogenesis

Bombogenesis would be an awesome name for a band. We hear the term a lot more with climate change as some massive storm rolls through. Can’t say I ever heard it in grad school. So, that’s the GeoCraic Geo-word of 2024. Say it out loud.

PNW Bomb Cyclone

Here’s a recent specific example from the US Pacific Northwest.

Missing La Niña?

Well, based on recent weather in the PNW I don’t think La Niña is missing any longer. But it was delayed this year.

Climate Emissions

Who's to blame for climate emmissions. (Source: Global Carbon Project • Casey Crownhart, MIT Technology Review)


I don’t really care who’s to blame for climate emissions. Maybe because I’m in the US, one of the countries most responsible. I just want some fucking political will and leadership to do something about it. I’m sure “blame” has something to do with deciding who pays for it, but this article makes clear there’s a lot more nuance. How about if we just tie a sufficient enough tax to GDP for remuneration and massive fines if you don’t keep your promises. Keep it simple.

Climate and Nature Wins

We have had some climate wins in 2024. It’s good to acknowledge these.

How Can Something This Big Be Invisible

Art worth a listen. This is a great poem but the “ownership” mentioned is a Western cultural perspective. Other cultures did not have the same perspective and that perspective could be the downfall of the planet. We need to help shift that perspective.

Uzbekistan

New Ancient Cities

Lidar continues to have an amazing impact on new archeological site discovery. New Silk Road cities have been mapped in Uzbekistan.

Africa

Flash Floods in the Sahara

30-50 year flood events in the Northern Sahara.

Central America

More on Mayan Valeriana

The jungle actually helped preserve acient Mayan cities.

United States

Mapping Thanksgiving

Where US pumpkins are grown. (Source: ESRI Story Map team)


Well, this shows how long this issue has been percolating. Since just after Thanksgiving (late November). Now it’s nearly New Year’s and I’m just getting it out. Sigh. Well done story map on where your holiday staples come from.

NYC Oyster re-wilding

The Billion Oyster Project, NYC


Rewilding Hudson Bay with a billion oysters! Great project. The BBC article is a great illustration of marine rewilding and oysters are an essential keystone species with huge benefits for the environment and for humans. Definitely peruse their article. If you really want to dig into oysters I highly recommend the “Geography of Oysters” by Rowan Jacobsen. Primarily about North American oysters, with a few shuckings on Global oysters. Another of my favorite authors, Mark Kurlansky, has a book on the history of NYC oysters that’s worth checking out. I’ll post a future review.

Demographic migration

The political impact of demographic migration to red states.

Drought

US Drought Conditions

New Precipitation Regions

The final map of 13 precipitation regions resulting from the cluster analysis.


There’s a new map of US precipitation regions.

South America

New Nazca lines AI assisted analysis reveals double the number of known Nazca lines. It took nearly a century to find 430 geoglyphs and now 303 more have been found in a 6 month field survey.

Qhapaq Ñan - The Incan road system

Great story of the Qhapaq Ñan’s last bridge. Woven from grass. Re-woven annually. It’s not widely known or appreciated that the Inca were master weavers and weaving extended to their infrastructure to include bridges for humans and llamas. Some of that knowledge is carried forward to today and still in use.

Biden in the Amazon

Biden went to the Amazon. That is quite the milestone as the first US president to visit the ecosystem. Now let’s see if we can keep it preserved through the next US president.

Southeast Asia

Grab maps

Google Maps has some competition in Southeast Asia.

Canada

Illustration of HBC Voyageurs


Hudson’s Bay Company

Looking at some of my brother’s work on family genaology we found an ancestor who worked for the Hudson Bay Company. Which started an interesting side quest to learn a bit more.

Solomon Islands

World’s largest known coral

We were in Australia this fall (2024) and of course had to do some diving on the Great Barrier Reef. Absolutely stunning and awesome. I’ll have more on the GBR in a future edition. Just after we left I saw this new discovery of the largest known coral. Super cool. The thing that I’ve learned relatively recently is that our existing distribution of coral world-wide is quite young. Corals are 100’s of millions of years old. But the greatest coral structure currently, the GBR, is only about 15-20 thousand years old. Since the end of the ice age and subsequent sea level rise. And this giant coral is only 300 years old. A baby compared to Sequoia. So, ironically it give me hope in a climate changing world. Humans, or at least our civilizations may crumble, the GBR is and will bleach further, but coral aren’t going anywhere.