The Earth Story

3-D imaging of a fossil echinoderm

Gorgeous close up, in-crater shots at the lava lake in Masaya Volcano, Nicaragua. Original caption:

Drone view captured while digitally mapping the crater edge alongside the Masaya Volcano Lava Lake, Nicaragua

Creating CGI Lava!

An 18 minute ski trip through the mountains and ice sheets in East Greenland, narrated by the folks who took it, plus some details on mapping and digitizing the landscape. This is pretty great.

WANNA SEE THE EARTH – NEKKID!?! What would our planet look like if, like the moon, there were no oceans, no forests, nothing to get in the way of seeing its real rocky surface?  Essentially, a geologic map is a representation of what some geographic area would look like if all vegetation, water, occluding soils, cities and parking lots were removed, ie, naked! The “real” colors of the earth are rather, well, bland and difficult to distinguish, so geologists use much prettier colors to represent rock formations on their maps. A rock formation is a unit that includes rocks of a certain age or age range that have a certain commonality in origin – they could all be one kind or rock (for example, granite) or an assortment of rock types that were all derived during the same parental geologic process (for example, all the myriads of kinds of rocks that might “fall” into a submarine canyon could be categorized as one sort of “mélange” formation). If one rock formation in country “A” includes deposits of petroleum, it makes sense that the same rock formation in country “B” would also. Thus maps of this sort are great help in exploration for resources.  A few years ago, in celebration of the United Nation’s International Year of the Planet, the OneGeology project undertook the creation of a digital geologic map of the entire earth. Over seventy countries took part, contributing the work needed to merge their own geologic maps with the world – a lot of agreements were made with respect to scale, what to include/not include, and deciding on those myriads of colors. The project is wonderfully successful, and continues to this day, ever more detailed, ever more inclusive. It even offers a digital geologic “Map of the Month”. Annie R. The image shown is from: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080731/full/news.2008.1001/box/1.html But in case you want some real fun, I highly recommend you to play around with the world-scale geologic map accessible through: http://www.onegeology.org/

Much of the world right now is consumed with the fate of a missing airliner that disappeared somewhere over the waters surrounding Indonesia. If it seems confusing to figure out how planes could disappear, consider this question regarding travel in a major metro area. If I asked you to visualise the flight path of 50,000 planes arriving and departing from the "North East" coast of the United States, would you be able to process it? If you could, did you picture something like this photo? This is in fact a computer generated image of GPS data collected from the 50,000 flights carrying 2 million passengers across the USA daily. This visual representation of data is not only captivating, but it is also useful. Similar images have been produced by using data from thousands of high-tech sensors dotted around the US which measure wind speed and direction. The results, when visually represented, help locate potential sites for successful wind farms. To see the wind map and other great images including a pizza delivery boy route in New York see here; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2161488/Secret-corpse-flights-pizza-boy-delivery-routes-daily-commute-Stunning-aerial-images-reveal-seen-America.html#ixzz21TxyiHA9 -Jean (Ps: Apologies about the Dailymail link, it was the only page with all the images on it, that I could find anyway) Picture courtesy of America Revealed.