Geography resources for teachers

Powerful Typhoon Wipha scraped by Tokyo and its surrounding prefectures Wednesday, narrowly avoiding landfall but causing fatal floods, landslides and major disruptions in transportation systems in its wake as it headed northeast along Japan's coast.

Here's a trippy thought: some enormous cosmic event takes place halfway across the universe, two neutron stars colliding or a black hole sucking, punching the fabric of space-time so hard that it sends out gravitational waves strong enough that they can eventually be felt on Earth. That would manifest as an irregularity or warping of time and space—a warping of reality, if you will.

Suppose you wanted to slip into a space quietly, secretly. Would you wear a dazzling, many-colored ball gown? I think not. So how do we explain what the Dutch government is doing on Google Maps? Is this any way to keep a secret?

Fifty-eight houses built by government in Nyanga, Cape Town, to be given to those who needed them. It should have been a happy ending – but it hasn’t turned out that way at all. A report last week told the story of how the state-subsidised houses in Nyanga have been vandalised beyond repair: broken into pieces in a dispute over which residents would have first access to them. It’s a sad tale which reflects a wider problem – people waiting for houses still believe in a “waiting line” that doesn’t really exist any more. By REBECCA DAVIS.

If you follow climate change news, it should come as little surprise that the World Meteorological Organization has announced that the first decade of the 21st century was the hottest on record, since the modern instrumental record began in the mid-1800s.

The WMO's new report, The Global Climate 2001-2010: a decade of extreme climate, lays out the hot, wet, and deadly details. 

The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. An international organisation with 20 Member States, the ESA in its current form was created in 1975. Since then they have shared amazing research and images for the world to learn from. With almost 12,000 high-resolution images available through their website, their extensive archive is a great online resource for research and inspiration.

After much anticipation, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Friday revealed it’s new assessment of climate change, after two years of deliberation. The bottom line: global temperatures and sea levels will rise even faster than everyone thought.

The moon is not as far away as some things, but it's definitely farther away than your nearest McDonalds or the bottom of the ocean or, you know, anything on Earth at all. Basically it's not easily accessible. So it would be pretty presumptuous for a person or group to say that they owned a certain part of it. Or all of it. But it's kind of complicated to figure out what would happen if anyone tried.

In 1972 the Earth Resources Technology Satellite, or Landsat, launched into space with a mission to circle the planet every 16 days and take pictures of the Earth. For more than forty years, the Landsat program has created the longest ever continuous record of Earth’s surface.

Now those images are available to everyone. And thanks to Google Earth Engine, it’s possible to download and analyze them.

The government owns at least 14% of the country, Parliament is due to hear, but ownership of 8.36-­million hectares is unaccounted for.

That is the finding of what was due to be a definitive audit of land ownership released, in abbreviated form, on Thursday, after it was approved by Cabinet earlier this week. The department of rural development and land reform, which was responsible for the massive audit, said full details of the findings would be available shortly, but could not be more specific by Thursday afternoon.

Generally speaking, Zimbabwe’s land reform programme is either touted as a glowing success or an outright failure. Sean Christie spent three weeks travelling around Zimbabwe’s rural areas recently and found that the narrowness of this debate masks far more complex dynamics, some of which will have dire consequences if left unacknowledged

One of the most stunning views a traveler can have in Paris is to round a corner and see the massive four-legged base of the Eiffel Tower. The view from the top is also amazing so much so that Google photographers hoisted their panoramic Street View camera into the tower and recorded breathtaking views from the three main levels. But keep your laptop with you. The Street View exhibit is one of three that Google now offers about the tower. Google’s Cultural Institute collaborated with the Eiffel Tower Operating Company to create three additional exhibits: The Birth of the Eiffel Tower, the tower’s construction, and another about its inauguration and early visitors.

“At SkyTruth, we work hard to make the unseen impacts of pollution and industrial development visible to the public,” the website says. “This often means making maps.”

The SkyTruth team doesn’t have enough eyes or time to sort the images alone—a sobering fact in and of itself, since it means there’s a good amount of fracking sites—so they’re calling on volunteers. Through the crowdsourcing platform CrowdCrafting, SkyTruth is asking people to classify images to add to their database.