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
Map lovers wanting to customize your phone cover, this is for you. Read the full blog post here from maps.com.
See on www.youtube.com
Facebook intern Paul Butler has created a detailed map of the world by mapping connections between people using the social network living in different cities.
The disconnected portions of the this map tell us as much about the world we live in as the highly illuminated ones. Might this be a version of the “Black Marble” image that would reasonate more with today’s teenagers? For the methods behind the creation of this map as well as a high resolution version of the map, see this post.
Tags: social media, map, visualization, cartography.
See on www.bbc.co.uk
I love this visualization of New York City’s evolving skyline from 1876-2013. The urban landscape of America’s prominent cities has changed dramatically.
Tags: historical,urban, architecture, landscape, NYC.
See on twitter.com
Ezekiel “Ziggy” Ansah’s journey to the NFL, beginning as a walk-on to the Brigham Young University football team from Accra, Ghana, who had never played foot…
Ezekiel loved playing soccer and never played American football until he was in his 20’s; that is NOT a typical path to the NFL. Ziggy’s life represents the geography of opportunity. If he had grown up in the United States, a boy with his physical abilities would have been funneled into football leagues at an early age. If he lived his whole life in Africa, he would never become a millionaire (probably not anyway). However, global diffusion of religious ideas brought LDS missionaries to his home in Ghana; enhanced migrational opportunities took him to Utah and all of these geographic factors (combined with his personal skills and ambition) helped him the fifth overall selection in the NFL Draft and a member of the Detroit Lions.
It makes be wonder if the greatest physical talent for a sport always gets the opportunity. I’m sure some kids in tropical countries have the physical tools to be fantastic hockey players, but without access to participation at an early age because of the cultural preferences of the area (although with hockey you could argue it’s also climatically determined), they are geographically constrained to a different set of possibilities for their lives. Read here for more on Ziggy.
See on www.youtube.com
When Anum Hussain heard about the Boston Marathon bombing, she immediately panicked, worried that the culprits would be like her. The 22-year-old Muslim was in the offices of Hubspot, the Cambridge marketing-software company she works for.
See on gawker.com
GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION 