#mapping

Oxbows and Meanders

/ PK Read / Leave a comment

I found this tangled map, created in 1944, over on the ever-fruitful NASA web site for the Earth Observatory. It shows historical changes along a stretch of the Mississippi River.

North of the Atchafalaya River. The 1999 satellite image shows an oxbow lake from 1785, created when a meander (a bend in the river) closes itself off to leave behind a crescent. From the Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River, published by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1944. Source: Earth Observatory

North of the Atchafalaya River. The 1999 satellite image shows an oxbow lake from 1785, created when a meander (a bend in the river) closes itself off to leave behind a crescent.
From the Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River, published by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1944.
Source: NASA/Earth Observatory

I stumbled upon it while looking at a small collection of river surveys from 1865, and comparing them to modern Google maps. There was this one, a stretch just south of St. Mary, Missouri.

Sheet 6 of the 1865 U.S. Coast Survey Map of the Mississippi River from Cairo, IL to St. Marys, MO. Source: Wikimedia

Sheet 6 of the 1865 U.S. Coast Survey Map of the Mississippi River from Cairo, IL to St. Mary, MO.
Source: Wikimedia

The modern one looks a bit different – fewer bends, fewer islands – but not so much that it would be unrecognizable. Notably, the large bend that once branched off to St. Mary, Missouri, visible at the top of each map, is now just a small tributary.

One might have expected more of a difference over the course of 150 years of population increase and civil engineering.

The same stretch of river, with St. Mary, Missouri in the upper left corner. Source: Googlemaps

The same stretch of river, with St. Mary, Missouri in the upper left corner.
Source: Googlemaps

But, at least on the Mississippi, the differences in major river flow come when the river is left alone to shift, meander, silt up and sidle over. The more humans work on this particular river, the more it stays the same. Levees are installed to prevent overflow (although they don’t always work).

The entire Mississippi Delta once shifted every 1,000 years or so – but with industries and port installations firmly established over the course of a few human generations, that would be an economic disaster. The Old River Control Structure, undertaken in the 1950s, keeps the delta in place.

More or less. At least, for the time being.

Because in the long run and when left to their own devices, rivers are all over the map.

Section of the 1944 Mississippi River Meander Belt. For more, visit here. Source: VisualNews

Section of the 1944 Mississippi River Meander Belt. For more, visit here.
Source: VisualNews

Subterranean Lines

/ 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

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

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

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

 

Let’s Play Big Data

/ PK Read / Leave a comment
Turbulence - artwork based on algorithms and hand-drawn systems to create computational and natural system visualisations. Artist: Owen Schuh via DataIsNature

Turbulence – artwork based on algorithms and hand-drawn systems to create computational and natural system visualisations.
Artist: Owen Schuh via DataIsNature

The other day I overheard a student next to me on a flight say, “I can remember the words to almost every song I’ve ever heard more than once or twice – if only the legal cases I need to learn were set to music, I could remember them all.”

Optimistic, I know, but maybe not so far off.

Appeal to the brain’s pleasure center and learning becomes as easy as humming a well-known tune.

Along the same lines, researchers have been turning to crowdsourced data processing to work through big data conundrums. Offer a means of pleasurable participation for data entry, such as a game platform, and citizen scientist gamers will come.

Cancer Research UK worked together with game developers to create a smartphone game that would help them outsource a large backlog of genetic micro-array data garnered from thousands of breast cancer patients over the years. The result was Play to Cure: Genes in Space, which is basically a space shooter game in which the player finds the best path through an obstacle course, shooting asteroids and mapping successful escape routes.

A sample of genetic micro-array data. The analysis involves identifying the areas where the dots are at their most dense. Source: Gamasutra

A sample of genetic micro-array data. The analysis involves identifying the areas where the dots are at their most dense.
Source: Gamasutra

The possible paths, however, are actually maps of genetic micro-arrays, and the players game solutions are uploaded to the Cancer Research UK database for processing. After one month of use, gamers worked through data that it would have taken researchers six months to process without assistance.

The game version of the original data, with possible paths marked through the denser areas. Source: Gamasutra

The Genes in Space game version of the original data, with possible paths marked through the denser areas.
Source: Gamasutra

Another game, Geo-Wiki, deals with processing data on cropland cover and land use. From the Geo-Wiki site: “Volunteers review hotspot maps of global land cover disagreement and determine, based on what they actually see in Google Earth and their local knowledge, if the land cover maps are correct or incorrect. Their input is recorded in a database, along with uploaded photos, to be used in the future for the creation of a new and improved global land cover map.”

The ‘game’ is a quick image/response competition. The platform can be expanded to include further agricultural and land-use data from users, which is then reflected in other projects that support better environmental monitoring.

The power of crowdsourcing is phenomenal, and I think we are just at the beginning of putting these tools to use outside of purely commercial marketing strategies. Having tried out both games, and having tried out the Geo-Wiki game, I think what’s still missing is that the games have to work on their own, as stand-alone games, for them to be truly addictive – and useful on a larger scale.EEHEoewC6vWEb-amrgU3OK2e5CXIY8I4aP6I52KHpuNcsBoUB8wD45If6sZhHuqhooIF=h900