EarthView Spring Visits

During the winter break, EarthView made its first international journey, as part of an environmental education program in Matagalpa, Nicaragua. EarthView team member Dr. Hayes-Bohanan visits the area every year as part of his Geography of Coffee study tour.

For the first time, Dr. Hayes-Bohanan and BSU students brought EarthView to Nicaragua, where we worked with local youth to give a presentation about the environment and geography to children in Matagalpa.

Now that EarthView is back at its home in Bridgewater, it is ready to go out to schools throughout Massachusetts. The schedule may change. As of today -- February 3, 2014 -- here is where EarthView is headed:

Friday, February 7: Inly School, Scituate
Friday, February 14: Frolio Middle School, Abington
Wednesday, February 19 (evening): Franklin Middle School, Franklin
Friday, February 28: Sharon Middle School, Sharon
Friday, March 7: Sharon Middle School, Sharon
Saturday, March 8: Westfield State University
March 21: Howe-Manning School, Middleton

Friday, March 28: Grover Middle School, Marblehead

Tuesday & Wednesday, April 8-9, New England Regional Conference on Social Studies, Sturbridge

Friday, April 11: Tenney Grammar School, Methuen
Tuesday, April 15: University of Dohuk, Kurdistan

WEEK OF EARTH DAY -- PLANS ARE UNDERWAY FOR A PUBLIC DISPLAY

Friday, May 2: Oak Ridge School, East Sandwich

Thursday evening, May 8: Horace Mann, Franklin
Friday, May 9: Barnstable Intermediate
Friday, May 16: Barnstable Intermediate
Friday, May 30: Cottage Street School, Sharon

Friday, June 6: Tantasqua Regional Junior High School, Fiskdale

Friday, Jun 13: Bridgewater Middle School

Spofford Pond School, Boxford -- Nov 1

42°41'46"N 

71°01'02"W
(Visit more about Lat/Long for ideas that combine math and geography learning.)

We have enjoyed several visits to Spofford Pond School in the past, and are delighted to be back this year. It is a school that really enjoys teaching and learning geography. In fact, during our visit we are learning about a special project the sixth graders are involved in a very special project in Global Citizenship.

The project is to raise funds for a foundation named Be Like Brit, which provides education and a home for children in the country of Haiti. As Spofford Pond students know, the foundation is named for Brit Gengel, a young local woman who lost her life in the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, while working to help children there. Because the earthquake caused so much destruction in Haiti, the Gengel family decided to help the people of Haiti while also honoring the loved one they lost.

The school is being built in Grand Goâve, but the EarthView team has not yet been able to locate it on Google Maps. This can be for one of three reasons: 1) the satellite imagery used by Google has not yet been updated; 2) it is located near the town, but not right in it; or 3) we just have not looked carefully enough.

CHALLENGE: We hope that someone from Spofford Pond School can help us find the school, and provide the exact latitude and longitude so we can update this post. Whoever finds it can let us know using the COMMENTS link below this post. Hint: Look at the Orphanage Photos page on Be Like Brit for some visual clues.
View Larger Map to explore the area. How far is it from the capital city? While looking at Haiti, compare its forest cover to that of neighboring Dominican Republic. One important reason for the extreme poverty of Haiti is the destructive practice of forest removal by French colonizers over 200 years ago. 

Early on the day of our visit, an earthquake occurred at 30.298°S 71.557°W. Notice that these coordinates are presented in degrees and decimal portions of degrees, rather than degrees-minutes-seconds. Still, the information provided is enough to figure out the country where this particular earthquake took place.

ANOTHER CHALLENGE: Where was it? What ocean is very nearby?
(The answer is at earthquake.usgs.gov. Don't click until you've tried to figure it out!)

In 2010 -- just a few weeks after the earthquake in Haiti -- this South American country experienced one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded. It caused a lot of damage, of course, but much less than had occurred in Haiti. At the time, we posted an article providing several geographic reasons that the earthquake in Haiti causes so much more damage than the one in South America. Learn more about Haiti from the Help. Hope. Haiti. blog established at Bridgewater State University in the weeks following the 2010 Earthquake.

Several times during our visit, the Globe Lady discussed tropical rain forests with several of the classes. As she mentioned, it is sometimes surprising that rain forests are actually quite difficult places for farming. Although rain and warm temperatures are good for crops, the constant rain and heat that sustains the tallest forests actually makes it difficult to grow crops. The heavy rain leaches nutrients from the soil, and the constant warmth provides an abundance of crops, many of which love to eat crops! It is sometimes surprising to learn that the most productive biome supports very small human populations. The effect is visible from nighttime satellites images, on which rain forests look mostly empty.

The great variety of species -- biodiversity -- in tropical rain forests allows them to survive in this difficult environment. No insect is interested in all of the varieties of plants, and the complex layers of vegetation and epiphytes allow nutrients to be cycled above ground -- sometimes right through the bark of trees!

As the the globe lady pointed out, rain forest biome is found in many locations around the equator, where the temperature and moisture conditions are the same. These include the rain forests of the Congo Basin, Indonesia, and the Amazon Basin. EarthView team member Dr. Hayes-Boh became a geographer because of his interest in the Amazon, and has written quite a lot about one particular part of the Brazilian Amazon -- the state of Rondonia.

We also sometimes describe the Wedding of the Waters, where the Amazon River is formed from the Rio Solimões (which is cloudy with sediment from the Andes) and Rio Negro (which is clear and dark with the tannic acids of the northern tributaries). The confluence of these rivers in Manaus is considered by many to be the start of the Amazon River, which flows so slowly that the two rivers do not mix for many miles.



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Back to North Andover

The EarthView team was very please to return to North Andover for the fifth annual Family Geography Night, which has been recognized throughout Massachusetts for its success of bringing an entire community together to learn and enjoy geography!

For more information about North Andover and these programs, please see previous North Andover posts on this blog and in its archived precursor (from BSC days). Each visit has allowed EarthView to be enjoyed by more than 800 members of the North Andover community.

North Reading Middle School -- Oct. 5

42° 34' 36" N
71° 05' 17" W
Learn more about Lat/Long

EarthView returns to North Reading today, on the 56th anniversary of the Soviet satellite Sputnik. This small, simple satellite could do nothing more than send a simple "ping" message back to the surface, but the fact that the Soviet Union was able to launch it before the United States energized the space program under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, eventually leading to human exploration of the moon.

Many of the tools that were developed as part of the space program are now used by geographers to learn more about the earth itself. These include earth-exploration programs such as LANDSAT, which monitors land use and conditions on a regular basis. It is also the basis for Global Positioning Systems (GPS), and for Google Maps and many other web sites that show what the earth looks like from above.

During some of the EarthView sessions today, Dr. Hayes-Bohanan described his visits with students to Cerro Negro and to the nearby volcanic islands in Lake Nicaragua. These islands are formed in a very unusual way, as each is a small piece of a large flow of lava from the nearby volcano Mombacho. Zoom out to see the relationship between the islands and the volcano. Zoom in to see the houses that occupy many of the islands. Some are the humble homes of people who earn their living fishing in Lake Nicaragua, while others are the vacation homes of some of the wealthiest families in Central America.


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Learn much more from our volcano roundup post.

Quashnet School, Mashpee -- Sept. 27

41° 37' 27" N70° 29' 41" W

Learn more about Lat/Long

EarthView's went to Cape Cod for its first program of the autumn season. Previous visits to Mashpee have been to the Middle School at  41° 36' 57" N, 70° 30' 34" W. Use the "Learn more" link above for ideas on how to use these coordinates for activities at home or in the classroom.
One of the great things about the Quashnet school (which has both an active web site and a frequently-updated school blog), is its labyrinth, visible here from Google Maps. 

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At least two members of the EarthView team completed the labyrinth, which is distinct from a maze, in that the proper route is not a mystery or puzzle. Rather, the maze provides an opportunity to calm the mind and enter a centered, balanced state that facilitates learning.

Our visit took place shortly after a new island was formed near the coast of Pakistan on September 26. This island is just about the size of a football or soccer field, and about 60 feet tall at the center. Because the internal pressure of volcanic gases is largely responsible for the emergence of the island, it may soon collapse below sea level, so that the world's newest island will probably soon be an extinct island.

Bridge Program -- July 12 & August 1

41°59'17"N 

70°58'21"W

Usually EarthView travels in a BSU van (we dream of getting a globe-painted van some day), but for this summer's special program for middle and high school students from New Bedford and Brockton, we were able to roll EarthView to the event on its luggage cart! To our location in the Kelly Gym, we had to travel only the smallest fraction of a degree of longitude, having started in the neighboring Math & Science Center, whose coordinates are: 

N 41°59'17"  

W 70°58'19"

These EarthView presentations are part of two sessions of the Bridge Partnership, each lasting two weeks. Students come from the cities to the north and south of Bridgewater for a taste of campus life and field trips include special places in the home cities of the participating students.

EarthView team member Dr. Hayes-Bohanan lives right next to the BSU campus, but has spent a lot of time in both Brockton and New Bedford, and enjoys learning about the geography of each. The reason? Each is a local place with fascinating global connections!

Across Two Fridays

The EarthView Experience map includes all of the visits we have made with EarthView, but this is such a busy week for EarthView that we decided to make a separate map just to show its travels from June 7 to June 14, 2013. This busy pace has been made possible by the fact that most K-12 schools are in session while BSU is on a summer schedule. More importantly, we have relied on current, former, and future EarthView wranglers from the Geography Department, along with a graduate of our EarthView Institute who is bringing EarthView to her own school.


View Across Two Fridays in a larger map

Continental Shifts

During our most recent EarthView presentation, as Dr. Domingo was speaking about Africa, a question came to mind for Dr. Hayes-Bohanan (who is writing this post). Noting that we always emphasize that it is a continent (when nearby islands are included) of 55 countries, the question came to mind: Where would the population of Africa rank if it were a country?

The search for information about population by continent led to a simple presentation by geohive of population changes by continent over the 1950-2050 century. As explained in our Population Primer article last year, this is the "bottleneck" century, of critical importance to the long-term balance between the population of humans and the health of ecosystems.

The shifts growth in population and the relative proportion among continents is described by this series of pie charts. The use of circles is perhaps not the best way to compare overall population, since the numbers are represented by area but the eye tends to compare diameters.

The pie charts what proportion of the population is on each continent at 25-year intervals. In reality, these are not continents in the physical sense, but major regions that make for convenient comparisons. One must look carefully to identify some of the important changes during this century. Most dramatic, is the decline of Europe's population, which has just half of the share of total population that it did only six decades ago.

The key to the charts includes Oceania, but with about one-half of one percent of the world's population throughout this century, it is not visible. How does this compare to the proportion of EarthView (and of the earth itself) occupied by these countries, which include Australia and all of the islands of the Pacific?

More About Continents

Oceania is not a continent, nor are many places in the world, though people ask geographers to assign islands to continents all the time. Geographer Matt Rosenberg addresses some of the most frequent questions that start with the words Which Continent? To understand his answer to the question about Greenland, look at EarthView or any map that shows North America and Greenland with their continental shelf.

Activities

Visit the article on geohive to see the numbers behind the charts above. Which regions have maintained their share most consistently, and which have grown the most in relation to other continents?

Experiment with other kinds of graphs -- such as bar and line graphs -- to see which are most effective at communicating the changes experienced during this period.

Finally, address the original question: If Africa were a country, what real country would be closest to it in the population rankings? 

You can answer the previous question for each continent except Asia. Why is Asia the exception?

World Cup 2014

Throughout the 2013-2014 school year, look for more information about the geography of football, which is known as "soccer" in the United States. In June and July 2014, The World Cup championships will be held in Brazil for the first time since 1950.

As most fans know, Brazil has won the Cup more often (five times) than any other country, and the game is among the country's most important pastimes. For this reason, the 2014 Cup is expected to be followed with special attention around the world. It will be an excellent time to learn more about the geography of a vast and dynamic country that has experienced many exciting changes in recent years.

Because the tournament involves many teams in several rounds, stadiums in 13 cities will be used, so that viewers of the games will have the opportunity to learn about all of the major regions of what is a far more diverse country than most people realize.

Because members of the EarthView team -- and several of the BSU alumni who have been involved with EarthView in the past -- have extensive experience in Brazil, this EarthView blog will include both academic and first-hand accounts of the geography of Latin America's largest country.

Massachusetts is home to a growing number of people from Brazil or people from the United States who have visited Brazil. The Bay State also has a growing number of economic and academic connections to Brazil, so the World Cup focus comes at a very important time for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Map: Wikipedia

For now, detailed information about the Cup and its venues can be found on Wikipedia and FIFA. Return to this blog throughout the coming year!

Litterati

Some geography students who are old enough to have an Instagram account might already be in the habit of taking photographs of their food. This is the story of a father who was walking with his young children and came up with a much better -- and richly geographic -- use of the technology. This short video explains how Litterati was created, and how it can be used to help create a cleaner planet.

Wind and Water

Our colleagues at Listen Edition have posted two recent articles of particular interest to geography educators, both related to weather and climate. Listen Edition is a new blog that serves as a sort of educational concierge of stories from public radio. Teachers in any discipline can use the site for audio, lesson ideas, and in some cases, detailed lesson plans.

Map from the original
NPR Storm Surge story

The first is Storm Surge Science, which describes efforts to communicate more effectively about the geography of storm surges. As Hurricane Sandy demonstrated, the high water driven ashore by hurricanes can be among their most important effects, but many people have not known how to interpret information about the surges. Cartographers and other scientists in New York City and at the National Hurricane Center in Miami are therefore working to create maps that are more effective than the language that has been used in previous storm warnings.

The other story is not going to be directly relevant for a while, but is nonetheless interesting. Canadian volunteers stepped into freezing wind tunnels to calibrate the traditional formula for Wind Chill Factor. A new formula has resulted that more accurately describes how cold a person would fee if exposed to a particular combination of wind and temperature. This story is accompanied by a complete lesson plan.

Sharon Middle School -- May 24

42° 06' 24" N
71° 09' 58" W 
Learn more about Lat/Long (including how to look them up by address)
Also, compare today's coordinates to those of other recent EarthView outings, near and far! 

This is EarthView's second visit to Sharon Middle School. (We were originally scheduled for the Ides of March, but were snowed out.) The blog post for our April 2012 visit describes the town of Sharon in terms of both site and situation -- geographic characteristics of the place itself and of the place in relation to other places. 

Today the EarthView team celebrates Sathwik Karnik's victory in the Natiional Geography Bee. The Karnik family of Plainville, Massachusetts is well known to us, as both Sathwik and his brother have been state bee champions and national finalists.

His winning answer was Chimbarazo, the world's tallest mountain, when measured from the center of the earth.

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Today is also a good day to talk about MOVEMENT, which is one of the Five Themes of Geography. This theme refers to the movements of people, products or ideas that connect PLACES.

May 24 is the anniversary of at least three important events that made future connections possible, and last night a bridge collapse led to a temporary but important loss of connection.

In 1844, the "Victorian Internet" began, as Samuel Morse sent the first telegraph message from Washington to Baltimore. The map below shows another kind of connection between the two, along the Interstate Highway System.


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During the EarthView presentation, Dr. Hayes-Bohanan mentioned the unusual relationship between the telegraph and the Brazilian city of Porto Velho. The connection is explained in the 1999 article Post-Frontier Towns of Rondonia, Brazil, with much more information about the region at Rondonia Web.

On this date in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge connected the two largest boroughs of New York City -- Manhattan and Brooklyn. John Roebling had constructed a similar bridge connecting Covington, Kentucky to Cincinnati, Ohio in 1866, but it is not quite as famous.


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In 1976, supersonic commercial air service connected both London and Paris to Washington, DC, as a Concorde SST was sent from each city to Dulles Airport in nearby Virginia. (The mother and aunt of EarthView team member Dr. Hayes-Bohanan were both there, but he had to go to school that day!) The map below from Geography of Transportation at Hofstra University shows all of the Concorde routes, since retired.

Finally, as mentioned above an important loss of connection occurred last night, when the Skagit River bridge over Interstate 5 collapsed. At least one small truck fell into the river, but nobody was severely injured. The bridge has been described as a major connection between the city of Seattle and the country of Canada. Google Maps already shows that segment as missing, so that navigation systems relying on Google Maps will not send drivers that way. Explore the map to see how difficult the rerouting of people and cargo will be while the bridge is being repaired.

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Is the Gulf of Mexico Being Harmed by Snot?

Public Radio for the Classroom

No, but scientists have described a "snot-like substance" as a serious problem for the food chain in the Gulf of Mexico, three years after the Deepwater Horizon spill there.

Map: Britannica

Dry Rivers

One of the most important lessons of the EarthView program is how water can be scarce on a planet covered with water. We learn that only one percent of the world's water is fresh, liquid water that is potentially usable for secondary human uses such as crops, livestock, and industry or primary uses such as bathing, cooking, and of course drinking.

Unfortunately, much of that one percent is at risk. National Geographic has recently published photographs from eight important rivers that do not always reach the oceans or seas to which they are connected on the map. It may be that some of EarthView's rivers should be drawn with a dotted line.

Raynham Middle School -- May 3

41° 56' 49" N
71° 02' 14" W 
Learn more about Lat/Long (including how to look them up by address)
Also, compare today's coordinates to those of other recent EarthView outings, near and far! 

Today EarthView is traveling just a short distance, to our neighbors at Raynham Middle School Access the EarthView Experience map to see just how far we have traveled today.

May 3 is the birthday of musician and conservationist Pete Seeger, whose work in protecting the waters of the Hudson River has been a great example. It is also the anniversary of the founding in 1802 of Washington, DC on land donated by Maryland and Virginia (the Virginia portion did not remain part of the city following the Civil War).

It is also the attainment day of EarthView team member Dr. Hayes-Bohanan and the birthday of his mother. Both of them were actually born in the District of Columbia -- the only place that is part of the United States but not of any state.

Our visit also comes on a beautiful, clear spring day in coastal New England. In this part of the world at this time of year, the daily range in temperature can be quite dramatic. The image at the right was captured from weather.gov a few days ago.

The images below are not quite as dramatic, but do show the importance of continentality, especially on dry days. Note the distance from the ocean of each of the communities shown, and calculate the difference between high and low temperatures each of the next couple of days and nights. What pattern can you discern?

Coastal:

Transitional:

Interior (note that this morning's temperature reading for Worcester is about an hour later than the other two):

During our visit, we had the pleasure of meeting two RMS students from Cape Verde -- Joel from Pedro Badejo on the island of Santiago, where Dr. Hayes-Bohanan took BSU students in 2006, and Vanessa from Fogo, where Dr. Hayes-Bohanan will be taking students in 2014. We took the opportunity to share some special lessons about Cape Verde's geography.

Trade Atlas

From the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge comes a fascinating online atlas that has no maps in the traditional sense. The Observatory of Economic Complexity is a model of all the world's imports and exports. The scale of the map represents the percentage of trade in any given category. The legend includes shading by type of export -- food, transportation, medical, and so on -- or by region of the world for some of the charts.

Users of the chart can examine the trade between any two countries, or between a single country and the entire world. Warning: this is so interesting that it can be habit-forming!

The atlas does not include three very important ways that money can flow between countries, some of which can be important in certain cases. It does not include tourism, donations of aid, or remittances (which are funds sent by migrants working in another country back to their families at home).

Zipper-dee-doo-da!

The EarthView blog often includes anniversaries related to geography. Today is the centennial of an event that is essential for EarthView itself. On April 29, 1913, Gideon Sundback received a patent for the modern zipper. 

His design was an improvement on the work of others, but it was such a dramatic improvement in simplicity and reliability that Sundman is widely considered the inventor of the modern zipper. Last year his birthday -- also in April -- was recognized by a Google doodle.

As we mentioned when the EarthView zipper was replaced about a year ago, without the zipper, EarthView itself would be impossible. To keep the zipper working smoothly, the EarthView wranglers frequently apply natural beeswax to its zipper.

EarthView at Stoughton

Through the occasional offering of EarthView Institute, Bridgewater State University is able to offer "EarthView Driver's  Licenses" to geography teachers throughout the region who wish to implement geography programs in their own schools. Stoughton's John Gunning and Rachel Killian were among the first to complete the course, enabling them to lead an exciting two-day program at the O'Donnell Middle School this week.

See the Wicked Local article Middle School Students Celebrate Earth Day in a BIG Way for more photos and details.

Oceans Five

Oceans are defined by a combination of their underlying geology, patterns of circulation, and human interaction. Just 13 years ago, a fifth ocean was "created" by defining parts of three others as a new entity, based on a prevailing current that circles Antarctica.

Click image for a better view.

As described on Geography.About.com, the Southern Ocean was defined in the spring of 2000. What was the only ocean at that time that did not cede part of its area to the new creation? The Southern Ocean is defined by the 60th parallel of southern latitude. This is not the one shown in yellow above, which is the Antarctic Circle, and which is very close to the Antarctic coastline on the eastern side. Rather, it is the parallel that is shown between 55 and 65 degrees. This corresponds very closely to the edge of the floor in EarthView, where Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are the only parts of the globe that are not hand-painted.

Read the oceans article on About.com for interesting information about each of the five oceans and their geographic importance. For the story about how the identity of the Atlantic Ocean came to be known so late in human history, see Biography of an Ocean (note that this article is on the archive version of our blog at its previous address, where many geography articles can be found).

Out of this World -- Sort Of

The geographers at Bridgewater State University are fortunate to have good relationships with geographers around the world. One of these is Dr. Francisco Henrique de Oliveira of the University of the State of Santa Catarina in Florianopolis, Brazil. As a specialist in surveying and mapping, he shares many interesting stories and images related to geotechnology.

He recently shared this graphic, which compares seven satellite orbits, including those of the International Space Station (ISS) and the the Global Positioning System (GPS). The highest orbit shown is the geostationary category, which includes a variety of satellites -- such as those used for television -- that need to stay in a constant position over the earth. (Learn more about GPS from our Where We Are post.)

We are working on exercises to compare these orbits at EarthView scale. For example each of the 24 satellites in the GPS system would orbit about 30 feet away from the surface of EarthView.

Please notice a few things about the diagram.

First, although it might seem to imply that all orbits run over the North and South Poles; this is not the case but simply makes the diagram readable.
Second, notice that the distances are expressed both as height above sea level and radius from the earth's center; the difference, of course, is the radius of the earth, about 4,000 miles.
Third, notice that the speed varies with height, with lower-orbiting satellites moving much faster than those at greater height.
Finally, notice that the time required to complete a full orbit increases with height; this is relationship between increased circumference and decreased speed as height increases.