Subterranean Lines

January 8, 2015January 8, 2015 / PK Read / Leave a comment

$A fracking well at the surface. Photo: Eugene Richards/National Geographic$

A fracking well at the surface.
Photo: Eugene Richards/National Geographic

The bulk of the fracking boom currently underway in the United States is not only in one of the least populated and remote states, North Dakota (population 724,000 – and it’s only that large because of the fracking boom and all the new workers there), but it also takes place mostly underground. Sure, there are the ominous towers of gas flames and the torn up ground at the extraction points, but the real action takes place so far beneath the topsoil layer as to render it abstract.

The gap between what fracking looks like from above, and what it looks like from below, reminds me of Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s drawings in The Little Prince. What everyone initially takes to be a sketch of hat is actually a rendering of something completely different, namely, an elephant inside a snake.

From The Little Prince
By: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

We humans are creatures of visual dependence. Or rather, what we can see tends to make the most conscious impression upon us, ahead of the more subtle senses of sound, taste, smell and touch.

And often, what is out of sight is truly out of mind. If we can’t see it, we have a hard time even thinking about it.

Well locations around New Town, N.D.
Source: Fractracker

These various maps and renderings of fracking in North Dakota attempt to make the underground activity more tangible, to show us the elephant inside the hat.

$Underground fracking lines, drawn from the well, with horizontal underground lines marking the extent of each well. New Town, North Dakota, from Mapping a Fracking Boom in North Dakota. Source: Mason Inman/Wired$

Underground fracking lines, drawn from the well, with horizontal underground lines marking the extent of each well. New Town, North Dakota, from Mapping a Fracking Boom in North Dakota.
Source: Mason Inman/Wired

According to Mason Inman over at Map Labs, who created the map above, “Each well travels down about two miles, then turns horizontally and snakes through the rock formation for another two miles. There were 8,406 of these Bakken wells, as of North Dakota’s latest count. If you lined them all up—including their vertical and horizontal parts—they’d loop all the way around the Earth.”

The New York Times took the added step of inverting the wells as if they were above ground, the long vertical drills standing like slender trunks one or two miles high, with only one or two branches of equal length suspended in the air, a high forest of activity.

The area around New Town, North Dakota, from What North Dakota Would Look Like if Its Oil Drilling Lines Were Aboveground
Source: Gregor Aisch/NYT

Weaving a New Mantle

May 22, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Moving at a glacial pace is how we’ve always described something so sluggish as to be practically immobile. Geological time is what we sometimes say when we talk about things that take forever to occur, at least when using the yardstick of human life spans.

The Earth’s mantle, that layer between the outer core of the planet and the surface, is mostly solid and we like to think of it that way.

But in what we consider geological time, it moves like a thick liquid. As it turns out, though, it moves a little more quickly than that, especially when a tectonic plate is sinking or rising. Sometimes at speeds 20-30 times faster than expected.

Embroidering the Earth's Mantle Artist: Remedios Varo

Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle (1961)
Artist: Remedios Varo

And then there’s the news that the ice of the Antarctic is melting faster than expected, great chunks of it breaking off and raising the sea level like to many ice cubes added to a glass of water.

What’s happening to the land that’s been beneath the ice all this time? What happens when the weight of eons is lifted and dispersed? The land rises.

However, the land is rising at a pace that is not very glacial. The land ‘rebound’ was expected to move in geological time. Instead, according to a recent study published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, it’s moving so quickly that researchers can chart its rise of over 15 mm (0.59 in.) per year using GPS. In some areas, the uplift could reach 47 mm (1.85 in.).

The cause is thought to be temperature or chemical changes in the composition to the Earth’s mantle, making it ‘runnier’ beneath the Antarctic than elsewhere.

The climate change we fashion in human time nudges the hand of the planetary clock to speeds we might just be able to see with the human eye.

River Garland

April 10, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Comparative View of the Lengths of the Principal Rivers in the World.
Source: C. Smith (1817) via David Rumsey Map Collection

Here’s a stunning bit of old cartography, a comparative view of the lengths of the world’s main rivers.

Published in 1817 and created by ‘C. Smith’, the rivers were ‘straightened out’ for better viewing, with compass arrows added along their lengths to indicate in which direction they actually twisted and turned. At least, the directions they took before most of them were enhanced through major engineering projects over the decades and centuries.

Posted on David Rumsey Map Collection, a description of the each river (the sea of exceedingly fine print) describes the course of the Missouri River as “recently explored by the Americans” (Lewis and Clark), and “extremely devious”.

The description of Italy’s Po River: “A celebrated Riv. and the largest in Italy…it often overflows its banks fertlizing the adjacent Country.”

I very much like how the Paraná and the Volga Rivers are so long that they spill out over the map’s own frame at the bottom.

Excerpt
Source: C. Smith (1817) via David Rumsey Map Collection

This excerpt shows an aspect of the map that I think is my favorite:

All the mouths of the rivers lined up next to one another, feeding into all the seas of the world at the same time.

I’m not sure what use this map served besides being a beautiful bit of geographical creativity, but some of the descriptions could be useful in comparing early 19th century river flow and direction with their modern developments.

Which brave cartographer will take up the challenge and create the modern version of this map?

Twilight and Sunstones

April 9, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Arctic sunset
Photo: Patrick Kelley/USGS

I freely admit that I can follow a map well enough, and also know the most rudimentary basics of navigating by the sky. Still, I managed to get lost yesterday, even with a Google map and the chipper assistance of voice GPS. I can only offer as an excuse that I was headed up a remote Swiss valley and there were a few too many roundabouts. In the end I followed my nose, the Luddite’s rudder, and found my way (more on this trip along the Absinthe Trail another time).

Uunartoq disc. Photo: Photo: Proceedings of the Royal Society via MNN

Uunartoq disc.
Photo: Proceedings of the Royal Society via MNN

In the case of the Vikings, some of their navigational technology has remained a mystery for centuries. Researchers have been working to decipher what is assumed to be an 11th-century navigational device. The Uunartoq artifact, a broken half-disc of engraved wood, was found beneath a Benedictine monastery in Greenland in 1948. It was long thought to be a compass of some kind.

A recently published paper goes one step further, and suggests that the Uunartoq piece is something a bit more exotic – it could be a twilight compass, capable of guiding mariners by the sun, even when the sun is below the horizon.

$A calcite stone, also known as a 'sunstone'. These stones are birefringent, which means that they have 2 refractive indexes. A light beam that enters such material is refracted at two different angles. Caption/Photo: Ricardo Esplugas$

A calcite stone, also known as a ‘sunstone’. These stones are birefringent, which means that they have 2 refractive indexes. A light beam that enters such material is refracted at two different angles.
Caption/Photo: Ricardo Esplugas

Aligning compass points using two ‘sunstones’, crystals which have two refractive points rather than one, the plate might have caught light sources no longer visible to the human eye. Not necessarily an instrument of extreme precision, but something that could keep a ship more or less on course until the sun came up again and new measurements could be taken.

This medieval sea navigation makes a deep impression on me. Once painstakingly learned, how was this precious information passed along within cultures and across generations?

And, just as intriguing, how was something this valuable ever lost and forgotten?

Sun compass vs. twilight compass Via: CAnMove

Sun compass vs. twilight compass
Via: Proceedings of the British Royal Society via CAnMove

Reaching New Shores

April 4, 2014April 4, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Circular plot of migration flows of at least 170,000 people between and within world regions during 2005 to 2010. Tick marks show the number of migrants (inflows and outflows) in millions.
Image: Abel et al., Science/AAAS via Co.Exist

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released a report on the development of climate change and its effects on humans.

The 2600-page report is the result of three years work and the collaboration of 300 scientists.

It makes for mostly grim reading, with an emphasis on climate impact on food security (not positive), on extreme weather events (increasing), and on poverty (again, not positive).

The global migration patterns in the interactive graphic above illustrate twenty years of migration statistics from 196 countries. Created by the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Human Capital in Vienna, the graphic uses software lifted from the field of genetic research.

It’s interesting to note that the number of people who actually leave their country of birth for good has remained at more or less the same level across decades – a mere 0.6% of the population. As a long-term expat among many long-term expats, it often seems like the number must be much higher, but such is the power of subjective perception. What we think we see up close isn’t always what’s happening if seen at a distance.

Quoted in Co.Exist, the authors say, “These long-distance flows are effective at redistributing population to countries with higher income levels, whereas return flows are negligible.” So, migration has been for mainly economic reasons, or for reasons of security offered in higher-income countries.

Given the IPCC report and its sobering conclusions regarding food security and extreme weather events, I wonder how these migration patterns and numbers will develop over the next few decades – which areas will see more migration inflow. The higher ground countries as well as those with higher-income?

Will we as humans follow many animals, flee an ever-warmer planetary midsection, and migrate north?

And what about that migration number of people who permanently leave their home country, 0.6%, that’s been steady for so long? Should climate change redraw the coastlines of continents and the boundaries of nations, what will count as ‘migration’ and what will count as keeping one’s head above water?

The World – Rising Sea Level, first map of its kind on such a scale and level of complexity, depicts our planet as it would look without its polar ice caps, with sea levels 260 ft higher as they are today. This detailed map can be viewed in all its glorious cartographic futurism by clicking on the map or following the link of the artist, Jay Simons.
Click map for a larger version.
Artist: Jay Simons

Seabed Data

March 5, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Image: Net Valley

The first trans-Atlantic communications cable was laid in 1858, carried across the ocean by two ships and connected to create instantaneous communication across an ocean.

Unfortunately, it only worked for few days, and it was almost ten years before a replacement was successfully laid. That cable, however, remained in service for a century.

I only mention that because I came across this global map of submarine communications cables. A cartography of big data streams at the bottom of the sea.

Submarine Cable Map (2014)
Source: TeleGeography
Click on the map for the interactive version

It all looks so tidy and reassuringly mechanical on a map like this.

Still, each and every festively colored line represents something like this:

That was laid like this:

Some of the cables, like those that cross the Izu-Ogasawara Trench off Japan, rest at 8000 meters (26,000 ft), a depth that almost equals the height of Mt. Everest. At some point, most of them must end up looking like some version of this:

The nuts and bolts of the modern world are subject to breakage, mostly due to either environmental forces (volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, storms) or human activity (mostly fishing lines, mining operations or dropped anchors).

Given the lack of knowledge of the Atlantic sea bed in the 19th century, it’s all the more impressive that the first successful cable last 100 years.

Seabed profiles.
Source: Telegeography

The Proverbial Drop

November 26, 2013 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Image: Pranav Singh

The recent Warsaw Climate Change Conference ended with a couple of modest successes, the main one being that the conversation will continue between nations as to what to do about man-made impact on the climate.

An initiative to support efforts at slowing deforestation received funding to the tune of $280 million from three countries.

Developed countries couldn’t quite bring themselves to say more than they would be willing to ‘contribute’ to emission cuts, rather than ‘commit’ to them.

Mainly, the nations who use the most keep insisting that change will be slow, and expensive.

Developing countries requested the twenty developed nations which have contributed to and profited most from the fossil fuel economy to pledge funds to mitigate, adapt and readjust this economy and its effects.

Amounts requested were between $70 billion per year by 2016, or $100 billion by 2020.

Meanwhile, an editorial piece by former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in the New York Times today states that the developed countries currently subsidize the fossil fuel economy to the tune of $485 billion.

That’s $485 billion every single year.

Not all expensive habits are worth keeping.

So here’s hoping that even a drop in the bucket will create enough ripples to make a change.

Input and Loss

November 21, 2013November 21, 2013 / PK Read / 2 Comments

At the UNFCCC COP19 in Warsaw this week, a new programme was launched under the auspices of the World Bank: The BioCarbon Fund Initiative for Sustainable Forest Landscapes (ISFL).

The initial funding amount is set at $280 million USD. Norway has pledged up to $135 million to the initiative, Britain $120 million and the United States $25 million. The fund also hopes to attract further private and public funding.

I thought it would be an interesting exercise to use the Global Forest Change tool released this week to look at forest change in each of the contributing countries, also in relation to their contribution to this new initiative.

Forest change Norway 2000-2012. The blue and red colors indicate net forest gain and loss, respectively. The colors here are almost exclusively seen on the Swedish side of the border. Norway does not rank among the top 50 nations in terms of deforestation, Sweden ranks 13th.
Image via Global Forest Change / Earth Engine Partners

With a goal of encouraging reduced greenhouse gas emissions from the land sector, including REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation), ISFL is intended to “help countries identify and promote climate-smart agricultural and low-carbon land-use practices in selected geographical areas where agriculture is a major cause of deforestation.”

The deforestation culprit in question is, by and large, commercial agriculture in regions including Latin America; subsistence and commercial agriculture contribute equally to an estimated two-thirds of deforestation in other areas like Africa and subtropical Asia.

The initiative sets itself the task of “adopting a landscape approach, (which) means implementing a development strategy that is climate smart, equitable, productive and profitable at scale and strives for environmental, social, and economic impact.”

Forest change in the United Kingdom 2000-2012, which is not among the top 50 nations in terms of forest loss.
Image via Global Forest Change / Earth Energy Partners

Measures include “protecting forests, restoring degraded lands, enhancing agricultural productivity, and improving livelihoods and local environments.”

According to this Reuters article, one of the key problems faced by initiatives seeking to reduce deforestation is that “parties are focusing all their energy arguing about the politics of who governs REDD+ finance, when the real issue is a lack of demand.”

This is according to Matt Leggett, head of policy at forest think-tank Global Canopy Programme, who also stated that “the program must create demand for nearly 1.5 billion tones of carbon dioxide equivalent to cut deforestation by half, but current projects are only set to cut emissions by 160 million tones.”

Forest change in the United States 2000-2012. The US ranks 3rd globally in terms of net forest loss. Image via Global Forest Change / Earth Energy Partners

Forest change in the United States 2000-2012. The US ranks 3rd globally in terms of net forest loss. (Canada ranks 4th.)
Image via Global Forest Change / Earth Energy Partners

Global Forest Map

November 20, 2013November 20, 2013 / PK Read / 1 Comment

A gorgeous new tool for assessing gain and loss in global forests was released this week by University of Maryland researchers, the result of a five year, broad-based collaborative project. The interactive map of Global Forest Change is powered by Google’s computing cloud will offer a means to establish forestry baselines around the world, with a great amount of detail.

Animation showing forest loss in Riau, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Much of this deforestation was to establish plantations for pulp and paper, timber, and palm oil production. Click image to enlarge.
Source: Mongabay.com

This excellent Mongabay.com article quotes the project’s lead author Matthew Hansen on the map and accompanying study (published in Science): “This is the first map of forest change that is globally consistent and locally relevant. Losses or gains in forest cover shape many important aspects of an ecosystem including, climate regulation, carbon storage, biodiversity and water supplies, but until now there has not been a way to get detailed, accurate, satellite-based and readily available data on forest cover change from local to global scales.”

It didn’t surprise me that Brazil and Indonesia are among the top five countries with the highest level of deforestation since 2000. The policies of those countries favor development of heavily forested, biodiverse areas.

Global Forest Map
The red areas indicate net forest loss.
Click on the image for the interactive map.
Source: Earth Engine Partners

As an Indonesian palm oil representative once told me, we shouldn’t worry about the loss of rainforest because it was mostly all cut down already, anyway. In its place, palm oil plantations. “Trees are trees, so we have offset deforestation with sustainable new forests.”

The new Global Forest Change tool accounts for this as well, with layered levels of data allowing users to see whether the forests in question are old growth, diverse habitats, or newer second-growth utility forests.

It did come as a surprise that Russia has lost more forest than any other nation, and that the top five are rounded out by the United States and Canada.

From Mongabay.com, “Improved understanding of the state of forests through tools like these should boost the ability of decision makers — from lawmakers to business leaders — to establish policies that better protect forests.”

Southern Swirl

October 18, 2013October 18, 2013 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Hurricanes and tropical storms since 1851
Credit: John Nelson/IDVSolutions
Click on the image to go to the full-size version.

Over on the ever-mesmerizing UXBlog, I found these hypnotic examples of historical cartography – a backward glance at a century of hurricanes. These maps are oriented with the Antarctic at the center, and show both the trajectory and intensity of each storm for which data was available.

According to John Nelson, who created the maps, ” The fine folks at NOAA (*National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) keep an archive of storm paths with wind speed, storm name, date, among other attributes, and are always updating and refining information for past events based on historical evidence and educated hunches.”

Of course, with the introduction of satellites, big data collection and heck, even the telephone, for communicating storm information, we know more about storms now than we did 160 years ago. Also, during the course of working out these maps, Nelson realized that “we only really started logging the East and South hemisphere versions of these things around 1978” – by ‘we’, I’m assuming he is referring to the US-based NOAA.

And this wouldn’t come as a surprise to me – it is only with the spread of globe-spanning communication and data technology that many have lifted their gaze from their own immediate surroundings and extended it to the rest of planet to see wider interactions.

Just as interesting is Nelson’s description of how he created these maps and how he arrived at this particular ‘bottoms-up’ perspective. The circle that looks like an iris around the pupil of the Antarctic is the equator – notice that the storms all swirl away from it in either direction.

Here’s an animated version of the map that displays all storm seasons dating back to 1978.

Hurricanes & storms by season, 1978-2010
Credit: John Nelson/IDVSolutions
Click on the image to go to the full-size version.

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