Branner Blog

In honor of the International Polar Year, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), created LIMA, the Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica.

From the site: “As the first major scientific outcome of the IPY, LIMA truly fulfills the IPY goals. LIMA is an international effort, supports current scientific polar research, encourages new projects, and helps the general public visualize Antarctica and changes happening to this southernmost environment. Researchers and the general public can download LIMA and all of the component Landsat scenes at no charge.”

Take a look.

[via] Climate Feedback.

The Everglades are in the news again, with Congress for the first time (11/9/07) over-riding one of President Bush’s rare vetoes. At issue was a $23.2 billion water projects bill, which includes funds for restoring the damaged southern Florida ecosystem. For a vivid picture of the Everglades landscape and ecology before decades of development changed it, read Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s “Everglades, River of Grass.” The first edition came out in 1947, a revised edition in 1978, a 50th anniversary edition in 1997, and the 60th anniversary edition this year. Douglas was a lifelong champion of the ‘glades, and a long life indeed she lived: 108 years. Even in old age, she was a riveting speaker. Before she was an environmentalist, Douglas was a journalist (for her father’s Miami Herald newspaper), and her book contains lively stories of early Florida history and flamboyant personalities. Although untrained in science, she had taken a course at Wellesley in environmental geography, so she saw and wrote about the Everglades as a complex system, whose fragile aquatic balance was greatly impacted by agriculture (sugar-growing in the south and dairy-farming in the north), drainage, channelling, and “improvement.” She grasped the intricate interplay between environment and public policy, and strove to influence policy in the direction of preserving the unique and precious region she cherished.

Are you going to be in or around Chicago between now and March 2008? If you love cartography, you will not want to miss the Festival of Maps. Over 30 organizations are joining in this city-wide celebration by hosting exhibits, talks, and meetings devoted to cartography. The Field Museum has mounted an exhibit entitled “Maps: Finding Our Place in the World” featuring a stone Inca map, a landscape vessel from Peru, a eucalyptus bark map from Australia, as well as more conventional maps from the 1200s to the present. The University of Chicago is hosting an exhibit featuring the spectacular Roman “Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae dating from the mid-1570’s. The Art Institute of Chicago has mounted an exhibit of historical maps of Paris. Other events can be found at the Festival of Maps Web site.

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