Geography Education

A new study using data from a pair of gravity-measuring NASA satellites finds that large parts of the arid Middle East region lost freshwater reserves rapidly during the past decade.

"[This] data show an alarming rate of decrease in total water storage in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, which currently have the second fastest rate of groundwater storage loss on Earth, after India," said Jay Famiglietti, principal investigator of the study and a hydrologist and professor at UC Irvine. "The rate was especially striking after the 2007 drought. Meanwhile, demand for freshwater continues to rise, and the region does not coordinate its water management because of different interpretations of international laws."

Tags: water, environment, consumption, resources, environment depend, Middle East, Iraq.

Detailed satellite images reveal the web of connections that sustain life on Earth.

Exclusive timelapse: See climate change, deforestation and urban sprawl unfold as Earth evolves over 30 years.

"Google Maps Engine makes it easy for you to create beautiful maps, share them with others, and reach your audience no matter where they are. It's built on the same platform that provides Google services to millions of people worldwide, so your users have a consistent and familiar experience wherever they are."

"Lake Manicouagan lies in an astrobleme in central Quebec covering an area of approximately 1206 square miles—an area half the size of Delaware. An astrobleme is a scar left on the Earth’s surface from an impact of a meteorite. Lake Manicouagan is the result of one of the largest identified asteroid or comet impacts on Earth. In the middle of the lake, on Rene-Levasseur Island, Mount Babel rises 3,123 feet into the air.

Lake Manicouagan is thought to have formed about 212 million years ago plus or minus 4 million years.  This happened when an approximately 3.1 mile-diameter asteroid crashed into Earth toward the end of the Triassic period. Some scientists speculate that this impact may have been responsible for the mass extinction that wiped out more than half of all living species."

Scraped clean and weighted down for thousands of years by Pleistocene ice sheets, Akimiski Island in James Bay provides a case study of how Earth's land surfaces evolve following glaciation.

Tags: remote sensing, geospatial,Canada.

"Learn how advances in geospatial technology and analytical methods have changed how we do everything, and discover how to make maps and analyze geographic patterns using the latest tools."

"Satellites acquire images in black and white, so how is it possible to create the beautiful color images that we see on television, in magazines, and on the internet? Computers provide us with the answer.

Images created using different bands (or wavelengths) have different contrast (light and dark areas). Computers make it possible to assign 'false color' to these black and white images. The three primary colors of light are red, green, and blue. Computer screens can display an image in three different bands at a time, by using a different primary color for each band. When we combine these three images we get a 'false color image.'

Find tutorials and links to free compositing programs here."

NASA.gov brings you images, videos and interactive features from the unique perspective of America’s space agency.

NASA has stunning galleries of images including this link to their daily image.  The big news today about the NASA images is that they have recently made the 172-page e-book Earth as Art a free download (PDF). 

About the Image: Portrait of Global Aerosols

"High-resolution global atmospheric modeling run on the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation at Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., provides a unique tool to study the role of weather in Earth's climate system. The Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5 (GEOS-5) is capable of simulating worldwide weather at resolutions of 10 to 3.5 kilometers (km).  This portrait of global aerosols was produced by a GEOS-5 simulation at a 10-kilometer resolution. Dust (red) is lifted from the surface, sea salt (blue) swirls inside cyclones, smoke (green) rises from fires, and sulfate particles (white) stream from volcanoes and fossil fuel emissions." 

TODALSIGS is an acronym for remembering the most basic elements of a good map.  This interactive briefly explains what each of the letters represents and how it is connected to map-making.  If this particular introduction is either too advanced or too basic for your students, simply run an internet search for the term TODALSIGS to find many other lesson plans and resources that might be more applicable to your institution (including this example-rich slideshow).