Geography resources for teachers

Map Stack is a web app that lets anyone create and customize maps based on data from OpenStreetMap. The app lets users change backgrounds, labels, add satellite imagery, and fine tune map colors. Map Stack was created by San Francisco design and technology studio Stamen Design.

THERE is nothing that the development of a multibillion-rand shale gas industry would not change in the quiet, 250-million-year-old landscape of the Karoo.

Currently the semi-desert area is home to just two people per square kilometre, most making a quiet living below the breadline.

Agriculture brings in about 12% of the money generated in the Karoo, but the biggest income is earned from the transport industry as passing trucks and their drivers are serviced and served by the local community.

In Iceland, researchers hope to watch volcanoes closely enough to predict eruptions. In Sicily, the most closely watched volcano continues to be unpredictable. In Alaska, researchers are running out of the necessary funding to try.   As Alaska's Mount Pavlof continues to pump out smoke and ash (that's it belching above), one question is on volcano watchers worldwide: When's the next big one?

Pavlof is on the Aleutian Arc about 625 miles from Anchorage, and began erupting on May 13, jetting lava and sending an ash cloud 20,000 feet into the air. It looks fantastic from space.

It is something many South Africans do not want to hear and would probably find hard to believe: Zimbabwe’s radical land redistribution has worked and agricultural production is on levels comparable to the time before the process started.

What is more meaningful is that the production levels were achieved by 245 000 black farmers on the land previously worked by some 6 000 white farmers.

I got this information from a new book, Zimbabwe Takes Back its Land by Joseph Hanlon, Jeanette Manjengwa and Teresa Smart.

One of the democratic government's biggest challenges has been to undo the notorious Natives Land Act of 1913 with land reform.

It started the process of depriving black South Africans of the right to own land in the country of their birth and became one of the cornerstones of apartheid. One of the democratic government’s biggest challenges has been to undo the Act with land reform. But as one black North West farmer has found, the process has also had some unintended consequences.

‘This is our farm. We bought it. Look at this title deed. Look carefully, whose name is there? That is my father’s name,” George Mphela, the oldest son of the late Amos, says passionately, as he points with his right index finger at the title deed he’s holding in his left hand.

The Great White North was pelted by 'ice tsunamis' over the weekend: walls of ice forming on the Great Lakes were pushed inland, destroying a couple dozen homes in Manitoba. No one was harmed, but 27 houses were completely crushed. Not to be insensitive to the homeless Canadians, but these tsunamis are actually pretty stunning to watch in action.

The event isn't too uncommon, and is prone to happen when strong winds kick up over large lakes after a late season cold spell. A smaller, less disastrous ice tsunami crept into Minnesota, where a resident caught the event on video. It's beautiful, in a sci-fi special effects kind of way:

The fascinating short documentary “Poynton Regenerated” by Martin Cassini tells the tale of Poynton, a small English village that removed the traffic lights, signs, and sidewalks from its busiest central intersection last year in an effort to revitalize its town square and alleviate traffic. The project is an example of the shared space street design concept, and while it may sound like chaos, it works remarkably well (see the before and after footage in the documentary). The redesign was the work of road designer Ben Hamilton-Baillie. For more on Poynton’s revitalization, see this article on The Atlantic Cities.

It's about that time. The lights are back on, and theres a plume of smoke pumping out of that dirty old Frankenstorm factory we all built. Storms' a-comin'.

Hurricane season officially begins on June 1st, and climatologists and meteorologists are bracing for another "above normal" or "extremely active" season. Above normal because humans built that frankenstorm factory in the first place, when we loaded up the atmosphere and the oceans with carbon and methane and cranked up the greenhouse effect. Now government climate forecasters say we're in for another hell of a season these next few months.

Land reform received a fair amount of attention in President Jacob Zuma’s 2013 State of the Nation Address.

Sceptics will say “we’ve heard it all before, now show us that something will happen” and the pessimists will say “there is no virtue in admitting failure and government still doesn’t understand the fundamental challenges facing land reform and the land claims process”.

The more positive view would be that Zuma has always placed land reform on the top of his agenda and that it was inevitable the process of identifying the central challenges in land reform would take up the five years of the policy cycle between the Polokwane and Mangaung conferences. The performance of the present government is dealt with in a departmental mid-term review released in 2012.

THIS year marks the centenary of the 1913 Land Act. Yet, very little is in the public debate about its multiple legacies in the present.

The centenary of the Land Act occurs 18 years after the South African constitution was enacted into law. While the function of the constitution in any society is broader than redressing past injustices; there can be no question that such redress is central in laying foundations for a society based on justice, freedom and equality – in all meanings.
There is general acceptance that South Africa’s land reform and redress has been frustratingly low. This is acknowledged by the leaders of the country as it is equally experienced by the communities who live with the legacy of that dispossession. Why is this so?