May 15, 2011 With a 50-50 chance of good weather, Matt and I headed out to Swiss Camp on Wednesday, May 4. We were lucky to get a break in the clouds and the wind that allowed the plane to land and drop us off safely with Koni and company. The weather continued to deteriorate over the […]
While poking around looking for imagery of the 1973 flooding on the Mississippi, I discovered some fascinating, very high resolution aerial photography. Images of Morgan City—a community near the mouth of the Atchafalaya River that was damaged by flooding in 1973, and will likely be hit by rising water in the next few weeks. Both […]
Historic flooding along the Mississippi River gives me an excuse to show another of my favorite maps, from Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River. Each color represents an old channel, dating back 1,000 years or so. Those that correspond to historical records are dated, while older channels are ordered according […]
Since I was (slightly) critical of the New York Times graphics department yesterday, I’ll show a Times map that is one of my favorite visualizations today: a map of shaking intensity and slip during the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Aside from being elegant, it’s data-rich without being cluttered, and multivariate. It shows shaking intensity (in […]
Last week, Jessica Ball of the American Geophysical Union’s Magma Cum Laude blog pointed out this map of natural hazards in the U.S., published by the New York Times: The map has many of the design virtues common in graphics from the Times (clean, focused on the data, clearly labeled, small multiples), but when I […]
I recently had the opportunity to attend & give a presentation at the 2011 International Symposium on Remote Sensing of the Environment in lovely Sydney, Australia. (OK, not so recently—the conference ended on the April 15th. I blame jetlag.) Just over 60 people turned up for the talk, which was mostly about our visualization of […]
We at the Meteoroid Environment Office are hoping that you have clear skies on May 5/6 when we have the opportunity to see pieces of Comet Halley whiz through Earth’s atmosphere!Image of an Eta Aquarid meteor, taken the night of May 3, 2011. (NASA/MSFC)Comet Halley (NASA)Depending on your age, you may remember 25 years ago …
May 3, 2011 When thrown properly, a boomerang will always come back to the thrower. (When thrown improperly, it ends up over the neighbor’s fence where a dog chews on it, and you don’t get your boomerang back, but that is another story for another day.) This afternoon, Matt and I enjoyed what is known […]
May 2, 2011 We have completed most of our preparations and are ready for our flight to Swiss Camp tomorrow. Today was spent tracking down our final cargo items and getting every to fit into boxes and bags – a trip to the cargo warehouse, a run to the airport to load a plane, back […]
May 1, 2011 Greetings from Greenland! Matt and I have had a relatively uneventful day and are now situated in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. After our unscheduled stop in Goose Bay last night, we boarded a flight for Greenland late this morning. After the requisite passport check, we were free to get situated and start the next […]
