stress-driven

Last week a major debris flow struck the town of Kedarnath, an important Hindu pilgrimage destination in the Uttarakhand region of northern India. One week on, details of the event are ever so slowly beginning to emerge, although the remoteness of Kedarnath, ongoing flooding within the region, and significant damage to infrastructure throughout Uttarakhand, means […]

The ‘Image Overlay’ tool is the key to an extremely simple, surprisingly powerful, and somehow little known trick in Google Earth. The tool allows anyone to copy maps out of print documents, drop them onto the terrain model in Google Earth, and then browse the maps in 3D – something that even the authors were […]

GeoGuessr provides a natural change of pace for a Sunday blog, though it’s also a great chance to highlight the growing coverage and interesting applications of Google Street View. GeoGuessr is a Google Chrome experiment from Anton Wallén which allows you to test your geographic knowledge against the Street View data by dropping you into five random scenes, and […]

Things are moving fast in the mobile world, and the last couple of years have been particularly progressive in the rather specific, but somehow exciting world of mobile GIS. This is allowing practitioners to tighten the loop between desk investigation, field study, and reporting, as mobile devices provide access to traditional reference data in the […]

Just under three weeks ago a catastrophic landslide claimed the lives of 83 workers at a copper/gold mine in China’s Tibet Autonomous Region. The victims are reported to have been local workers employed by a Chinese national mining company. Many details of this tragic event are described in news reports, and summarized on Dave Petley’s landslide blog, where […]

In my last post I discussed the growing volume of geodata available online – and in particular ways in which it can be accessed by freely available GIS software. This kind of accessibility has great potential for geoscientists, and among other uses (e.g. teaching, structural geology) perhaps is a step toward ‘crowdsourcing’ geotechnical expertise for […]

After spending some time working on the Bavaria maps pages (both the Earth and Maps pages work now!), I recently went in search of a way to project the same data in a vector format. At the moment I use the GDAL library (specifically gdalwarp and gdal2tiles) to convert georeferenced .tiff files to a .png format […]

Hi all, Over the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time working in the Alps – learning about the valley geomorphology, slope instabilities, bedrock properties… enjoying the steep valleys, long trails, alternately hot and freezing weather, and supermarkets closed at lunchtime.  A German version of steep valleys and freezing weather; A view from the top […]