News 8 chief photojournalist Kevyn Fowler captured a road collapsing in Freeport, Maine during a storm.
The forces of erosion are usually slow and gradual, wearing away at landforms over the course of years. This video show the quick and dynamic factor that erosion can be…this is easily the most compelling 3 minute video about a single patch of road that I’ve ever seen.
Tags: physical, water, disasters, geomorphology, erosion.
See on www.youtube.com
Oakland, Calif., was a hub of African-American life on the West Coast. Today, it’s one of the most diverse cities in the country. How has that shift affected its culture?
The NPR blog Code Switch focuses on issues of race, culture and ethnicity. In this podcast they explore the changing demographics of Oakland due to gentrification and the cultural impact that it has had. In the 80s, African-Americans represented nearly half of Oakland’s population, but today is now 34 percent white, 28 percent black, 25 percent Latino and 17 percent Asian. The music scene, night life and sense of communal identity has consequently shifted, and that causes some to yearn for what once was.
Tags: neighborhood, gentrification, urban, place, culture, economic.
See on www.npr.org
From the world’s largest seas to islands and coastlines, will you sink or swim in this challenging geography quiz? Dive into our selection of sea based trivia now!
See on www.quizfortune.com
I’ve posted on this previously, but this imgur gallery puts the images in a stunning new format for sharing. This gallery portrays 20 families from around world together with their weeks food. The differences in agricultural, development and cultural patterns are plainly manifest. For more context on this photographic project (as well as the details of the families and their food), it is chronicled in the book Hungry Planet. or an abbreviated version online.
Tags: food, agriculture, worldwide, consumption, culture, development.
See on imgur.com
May-Britt and Edvard I. Moser are exploring the way the brain records and remembers movement in space, which they speculate may be the basis of all memory.
This is more neuroscience than it is geography, but it is incredibly relevant to geographers and spatial analysis. These Norwegian neuroscientists are charting the brain to understand how we remember where we have been, where we are and how we navigate through space. They are primarily mapping out the brains of rats, but much of what they’ve discovered appears to hold for all mammals. There are certain cells that are only active when you are in certain places. These cells interact as a network in a grid pattern, forming a very regular hexagonal pattern (central place theory!?!). These ‘place cells’ or ‘grid cells’ store information about distances and directions and are crucial to navigation. Read more about it in this article or watch this 6-minute video.
Tags: spatial, mental maps.
See on www.nytimes.com
Climate change is dramatically altering the Swiss Alps, where hundreds of bodies of water are being created by melting glaciers. Though the lakes can attract tourists and even generate electricity, local residents also fear catastrophic tidal waves.
Earth systems are inherently dynamic; however a change to system such as climate change can upset the system dramatically.
Tags: climate change, water, physical, geomorphology, landforms.
See on www.spiegel.de
“Every so often, if you ride Moscow’s crowded subways, you may notice that the commuters around you include a dog – a stray dog, on its own, just using the handy underground Metro to beat the traffic and get from A to B. Yes, some of Moscow’s stray dogs have figured out how to use the city’s immense and complex subway system, getting on and off at their regular stops.”
Even if only a small fraction of strays have figured out how to navigate the subway system, it represents another example of how animals have adapted to the urban ecosystem in a way that human did not intend. The dogs get on the subway in the morning and go downtown searching for food and return to the suburbs to sleep. This has been circulating on social media sites, and I find it endlessly fascinating.
Tags: urban ecology, Russia, environment adapt, biogeography.
See on abcnews.go.com
I wish I had seen this video from the Washington Post when I was preparing last week’s Geography of Chechnya post.
See on www.youtube.com
What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster [Jonathan V. Last] on Amazon.com. *FREE* super saver shipping on qualifying offers. Look around you and think for a minute: Is America too crowded?
I have yet to read this book, but the title alone says that it could be an intriguing supplemental text for a unit on population. For those that have read the book, please comment below.
Tags: USA, declining population, population, demographics, models.
See on http://www.amazon.com
GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION 