Geography resources for teachers

In this episode of Eye on Gauteng we look at urban renewal and the case currently being made by the residents and business owners of the Maboneng Precinct in down town Jo’burg.

The Eye on Gauteng team visits the area to hear the stories of those that live, work and play there. We also find out more about doing business in Joburg’s inner city.

Medellin is a city that has achieved a lot in the last 20 years. It has transcended its difficult past and become a better integrated, more accessible and safer place to live than before. It is no longer the ‘no-go’ city for Colombians, tourists and businesses that it once was.

Today Medellin is a bustling, cosmopolitan city with a good transport system that is clean, efficient and integrated. The city’s public spaces are well-used, accessible and contribute to uplifting the areas in which they have been developed. Citizens enjoy greater access – via the city’s integrated transit routes – to neighbouring communities, libraries, schools and other public facilities like community parks and educational institutions than previously.

Neighbourhoods, particularly in the city’s poorer areas, are safer than they were before.

Geoneutrinos paint picture of deep-mantle processes.

A window on the deep Earth opened unexpectedly in 2011, when Japan’s nuclear reactors were shut down after the Fukushima disaster. Before the closure, an underground particle detector called KamLAND based in Kamioka, Japan, was monitoring a torrent of neutrinos streaming from dozens of nearby nuclear reactors, seeking clues to the nature of these hard-to-catch subatomic particles. After those plants fell silent, KamLAND scientists could see more clearly a signal that had largely been obscured: a faint trickle of neutrinos produced inside the planet.

Neutrinos are generated in stars, reactors, and deep in Earth’s crust and mantle by the radio­active decay of elements such as uranium and thorium. KamLAND reported the first tentative detections of these ‘geoneutrinos’ in 2005 (ref. 1). But last month at a conference in Takayama, Japan, KamLAND scientists reported seeing them in meaningful quantities — as did a team at the Borexino neutrino detector at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory near L’Aquila, Italy.

Climate change has a disconcerting tendency to amplify itself through feedback effects. Melting sea ice exposes dark water, allowing the ocean to soak up more heat. Arctic warming speeds the release of carbon dioxide from permafrost. And, as researchers discussed at a meeting last week in Seefeld, Austria, climate extremes — heatwaves, droughts and storms — can hamper plant growth, weakening a major buffer against the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere.

“Heatwaves and droughts will very likely become more frequent in a warmer climate, and ecosystems will somehow respond,” says Philippe Ciais, a carbon-cycle researcher at the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences in Gif-sur-Yvette, France. “More storms will add an extra dimension to the problem.”

The March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami left more than 28,000 dead or missing. See incredible footage of the tsunami swamping cities and turning buildings into rubble.

Zhangye Danxia - Geology From a Storybook

Long ago, colorful sediments were deposited in western China, layer after layer, century after century. If you were there at the time, you would have seen unremarkable ground, a single hue of dirt no different from a thousand other places on Earth. 

But after thousands and thousands of years subject to the forces of pressure and tectonic movement, the total of those layers has been pushed upward, letting us peek at a rainbow-hued slice of Earth’s past perhaps unmatched on this planet. The planet looks more like the cross-section of a jawbreaker candy than layers of rock in these photos, near Zhangye, China.

DAYLIGHT filters through the ether in Africa’s tallest residential building, a brutalist cylindrical skyscraper with a hollow core that drops 54 floors to a ragged base of exposed bedrock. The view into the interior is eerie, a dim light giving it a sci-fi feel that recalls the film “Blade Runner”. But the outward-facing windows offer breathtakingly clear views, some of the best in Johannesburg, South Africa’s commercial capital.

Ponte City was a posh address when it opened in 1975 at the edge of what was then the trendy inner-city district of Hillbrow, during the race-segregated era when central Johannesburg boomed. Ambitious developers planned to add an indoor ski slope inside the building.

Emma Hartley: Hadfield's photograph, taken from the International Space Station, showed a divide between the east and west of the German capital

The Berlin Wall may be physically disappearing – David Hasselhoff went there to campaign for its preservation last month – but some things last longer than mere bricks and mortar. Town planning, for instance, as Colonel Chris Hadfield demonstrated when he took this picture of Berlin from the International Space Station on Wednesday last week.

The Canadian astronaut has become a social media star thanks to his efforts to normalise space flight by telling us about his experiences through the medium. And what better way to engage humanity than by showing it pictures of itself and the planet on which it lives from his heroic perspective?

An ambitious plan to slash greenhouse-gas emissions must clear some high technical and economic hurdles.

In an industrial warehouse on the outskirts of Stuttgart, the sooty past is shaking hands with Germany's green-energy future. In one corner sits a relic destined for a museum: a cast-iron engine as big as a bus, which was used until the early 1970s to compress coal gas for lighting, cooking and heating. Nearby, a gleaming network of stainless-steel tanks uses electricity to create methane out of water and carbon dioxide.

This power-to-gas (P2G) pilot plant is the largest of its kind in the world, and the research behind it could help to propel Germany to the front of the race for cleaner energy. Developers of the €3.5-million (US$4.5-million) project say that the P2G technology is an ideal way to cope with the unreliable nature of solar and wind power. During sunny or breezy days, excess electricity can be used to make methane, which can be stored and then burned to generate power when the winds fail or the days turn dark.

What’s surprising about Everest Base Camp is the color. It’s a flinty, gray place littered with shards of Himalayan sandstone and shale. Here and there appears a vivid green pool of alpine water. And then there’s the red, blue and green prayer flags hung by Himalayans to blow blessings in the wind.

Google Street View’s latest project, the World’s Highest Peaks, takes us to Everest and two other mountains included in the Seven Summits—the highest mountains on each of the seven continents.

Teams of mountaineers toted digital cameras on treks to the top of each mountain and integrated their images into Google maps so we can trek along with them from the comfort of our laptops, iPhones or Android devices. Like Google Street View’s Ocean gallery, the mountain images bring us to places we may never see with our own eyes.

Back in 1999, Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann released the climate change movement's most potent symbol: The "hockey stick," a line graph of global temperature over the last 1,500 years that shows an unmistakable, massive uptick in the 20th century, when humans began to dump large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It's among the most compelling bits of proof out there that human beings are behind global warming, and as such has become a target on Mann's back for climate denialists looking to draw a bead on scientists.