A One Billion Dollar Geological Map Of The Arctic

That's what it has cost approximately for Canada, Russia, the United States, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden to collaborate and share data and produce a geological map of the circum- polar arctic region. I imported a MrSid digital version of the map in my Manifold GIS. I downloaded the digital version from the Natural Resources Canada digital data download site. There are JPEG 2000 and Acrobat versions of the image also available.



More details from Spatial Sustain:

A collaborative geological map of Arctic geology across circumpolar countries was completed in November 2008 as part of the International Polar Year. The 1:5,000,000 scale bedrock geology map and related digital data sets relate to the objectives of the Commission for the Geological Map of the World.

The project objectives were to compile details to produce a hardcopy map of the circumpolar Arctic, while also synthesizing data to form a spatial database. The archive will provide the means to create additional digital products. This effort serves as a model for subsurface spatial data collection for other parts of the globe....

Its not just the arctic sea bed that is of interest to countries. See also this article by the Economist on sea-bed mineral riches and the economic and technological hurdles faced by countries trying to exploit these resources. India for example has been wanting to exploit manganese nodules from the Arabian deep sea for decades. There has not been any successful commercial exploitation yet but that might change in the future.

Countries have a sovereign right to exploit the sea bed up to 200 miles from their coasts. The 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea allows countries to extend their claim if they can show that their continental shelves extend beyond this range. For countries who ratified this convention before May 13 1999, the deadline to submit these claims is May 13 2009. There is a lot of real estate at stake here. Around 15 million sq km of it. Canada is seeking 1.7m sq km but get this ... eight Pacific island nations including Fiji are claiming 1.5 m sq km! With hundreds of islands they have a lot of coastline that can in principle be extended. I am not familiar with the geology of the Pacific islands but Fiji does claim that there is oil and gas to be exploited from carbonate reefal traps of Cenozoic age.

India has a couple more days to submit its claim. No new yet about that... but Pakistan already has. Of particular importance is the deep water Indus river fan and deltaic system. That is likely to have significant hydrocarbon potential.

Hobbits Are In The News Again

Those enigmatic bones from the island of Flores interpreted to be the remains of a 3 feet tall hominid known as Homo floresiensis are making waves again. This tiny hominid lived as recently as 17,000 years ago. Bones are associated with stone tools, an indication that this creature had some smarts.

There are three main hypothesis as to where to place this creature within the hominid family tree.

1) Ancestor Homo erectus migrated to Flores island maybe more than a million years ago and then that population shrank in stature, a process known as insular dwarfing. Also some reversal in traits occurred, a hypothesis required to explain the primitive (ancestral state) nature of wrists and feet.

2) Descended from an ancestor even older than Homo erectus ...maybe Homo habilus..? and then underwent dwarfism on Flores island. Could explain the puzzling primitive traits (wrists and feet) in the descendant hobbits and the small brain size. One problem with this hypothesis is that no other fossil hominids earlier than Homo erectus are known outside Africa ...so far.

3) Bones belong to diseased modern humans. No special evolutionary scenario required.

There's been lots of reading about some of the latest findings on Hobbits. I found this review on the Origins blog most well written and information. NY Times also has a couple of good articles here and here.

One thing that has struck me about this debate is how integral the field of developmental biology is becoming in fashioning evolutionary hypothesis not just to explain trends in size and shape and novel features but to ascertain ancestry and evolutionary relationships.

And bridging these two fields in this case is not molecular genetics, embryos and Hox genes ..... but bones.

Florida State Geosciences In An Existential Quandary

Geology and livelihoods - 5

I've been having an email to and fro with my Ph.D adviser. There is bad news coming out of Florida State Univ, Geology department. The extreme scenario is that the department may be dissolved. There is a chance that budget cuts may be that bad. Faculty has proposed a workaround that may save the program or at least some part of it and that would be by merging with Oceanography. The joint undergraduate degree will go by the name "Environmental Science" and would have less stringent requirements of math and physics.

Such an interdisciplinary degree course might mean a number of core geology courses might not be taught at all. I just wonder if crystallography, mineral optics, advanced igneous / metamorphic will get axed ... along with a few faculty! Apparently geoscience enrollment at Florida State has been in the decline for the last decade or so and the University going through a list of departments targeted geology .. and presumably oceanography.

I don't have news on what the syllabus of this new proposed course would be like. Florida State offered quite a well rounded geology undergraduate degree with a really good summer field camp in New Mexico for majors. By the name of it - Environmental Science- it looks like the orientation will be more towards applied courses... you know getting graduates trained for the modern marketplace. Maybe courses will be tailored to address problems close to home. Those would be coastal processes, surface and groundwater hydrology, soil sciences..?

All this doesn't really go too well with less math and physics. Students with a math background would have an advantage in the the modern marketplace whether they come out with a geology degree or an environmental science one. But the department and the University is in survival mode right now and getting more students enrolled is the priority even if that means lowering the standard of a science degree. I can't help thinking whether in a weird way this new arrangement might help at least some students think about the graduate geoscience stream. I've run into students taking their first undergraduate geology course, liking it, but then balking at the prospect of graduating in geology because of the calculus requirement. So they stop taking geology courses after that. Maybe this way with no math requirement a lot more students might complete an environmental sciences undergraduate degree and then decide that they like the subject enough to get over their fear of math which would be part of the graduate degree requirement.

That's just me trying to put a positive spin on a damp situation. I hope some survival strategy works and faculty don't lose their jobs ... chances are that some might. And right now I'm just upset that come fall my old department will be living only in my memory.

See: Geology and livelihoods

Bill Maher Speaks On Swine Flu

Funny video!

It really cracks me up on how much ridicule fundamentalists and creationists invite.

Take a look



Will creationists now just pray that the flu goes away or secretly hope that researchers using evolutionary reasoning find out a way to stop this virus?

Tip: WEIT

Land Use Web Maps Through Bhoosampada; I Hope Bhuvan Is Not Like This

My post series on GIS web mapping applications for users to view, browse and query Indian spatial datasets continues. This post is on an application that allows users to view and get information about the land use and land cover of India.

Bhoosampada is the name of the application (it means earth's bounty, a reference to natural resources of India) developed under the aegis of the National Remote Sensing Centre, Hyderabad, India. Other Indian space organizations based in Dehradun, Jaipur and Bangalore have contributed to this project. It promises the user a rapid assessment of national level land use and land cover.

Right on! Entry to the application was surprisingly quick. I had to register, but the response was automated and I got my user name and password validated in a jiffy. I had given my India address. I would love to see someone from outside India try to register as a check on whether that causes the "security issues" mandarins any heartaches. If anyone has tried it do let me know.

Anyways below is the application interface.


It's a standard web mapping interface. The default view is an outline of India with the land use and land cover (LULC) overlaid. You can zoom and pan using the tools or zoom to a predetermined scale using the scale tool. The choice is from 1:1 million to 1: 200,000. Not that great I know! But apparently this is a National level LULC mapping effort that will be done on a yearly basis on a 1:250,000 scale. So for the time being users have to deal with a somewhat coarse dataset.

The LULC classes have been derived using a classification scheme on imagery from the IRS-P6 or Resourcesat-I satellite's Advanced Wide Field Sensor (AWiFS) with additional imagery input from earlier IRS series sensors. The pixel resolution is 56 m. The NRSA project manual describes in detail all the satellite image processing and classification methodology along with metadata standards.

In the layer list there are two types of layers. Those that can be queried and those that are only for display. Layers only for display are the LULC classes, water bodies and snow cover. Layers that can be queried are administrative boundaries- State, District, Taluka, District Headquarters and Major Towns.

Information on LULC is available at the State and District level. You can use the hyperlink tool to click within the State or District (after activating the layer) and a pop-up window displays the LULC statistics for 19 classes for the previous 4 years. There is a graphical representation and a per-capita and change analysis table also for viewing. Census data of the state or district is also thrown in for good measure.

This tool really forms the main information gathering mechanism of this application. This is good solid information about the country's natural and crop resources and even if aggregated only up to the district level I imagine would be very useful for regional scale projects. I would have liked to have the same information aggregated by river basin and subbasins also. A lot of projects are done using these natural boundaries as the study area.

You can select administrative units using the query builder and use the buffer function to build a buffer of specified distance. You can collect attributes of entities falling inside the buffer, but only those entities that can be queried i.e. the admin units. The query builder does not look like a finished product. I could select only one entity at a time. The logical operators that would allow users to select conditionally failed every time I tried a selection.

Now to the dynamic spatial analysis on LULC..... Its a downer since the application doesn't really allow any interesting spatial analysis on the LULC classes.

Isn't that a strange comment to make on my part? Didn't I mention above that you can click on a State or District and get the LULC stats? Isn't that doing spatial analysis?

No... it isn't! At least not from a GIS perspective.

What a user is doing online simply amounts to an information retrieval operation using the outline of a district or a state as a guide. The LULC stats have already been generated and stored and are sent to the user on request activated by a click. The hyperlink button is really that. Its a link to data that already exists. There is no data being created and assembled on the fly through spatial analysis on the LULC classes. That's the characteristic of a dynamic GIS app. In this case NRSA has prepared the LULC information bundle on each state and district in advance. They could have just created a web page with a list of state and district names and linked each name to a LULC results page. But putting a graphic front end like the Bhoosampada map viewer and letting users click on a map makes the application look more complex than it is.

What would a dynamic spatial analysis of LULC look like?

Let's say a user builds a 50 km buffer around a town selected using the query builder and that operation also retrieves the stats of LULC classes falling inside the 50 km distance. Answers to spatial questions like this one can't be anticipated and canned and requires dynamic on the fly spatial analysis on the GIS application server and then assembling those results and sending them to the user. As it stands now such dynamic queries are restricted only to selecting administrative units or building buffers around such selected entities. Maybe there were performance or other technology issues that NRSA ran into or maybe they thought users are too stupid to think of such complex analysis.

Another area in which this application fails the user and one which is even more serious than the lack of spatial queries is in the limited data sets available for overlay. I know the focus is on LULC. But displaying this layer as an isolated dataset conveys less information about why LULC variability is the way it is.

If only geographic associations had been included!

What I mean is that a country's land cover and land use spatial patterns arise through the interplay of several natural and anthropogenic influences. Rainfall, temperature, topography, soils, geology, groundwater, river basins and roads to name some, all play a role in the distribution of natural resources and how the land is being used by humans for various purposes. Addition of these layers just for overlay and attribute information purposes if not for complex analysis would lend a larger spatial context to the LULC classes and make for a more enriching and productive user experience.

Few minor quibbles. The LULC color scheme shouted out at me. I like my GIS maps colored more earth and pastel. And some design issues. In the LULC stats table you have the option of printing but no easy option to save that information in a spreadsheet format. This is tabular info, so an option to save in excel or a database should be available. Small but important details. Finishing touches in Indian government applications are always found wanting.

And finally you can request for the actual data.

But wait... the general public can get them only as hard copies and those too at a 1: 1 million scale or a 1:250,000 scale. Only scientific users of data as recognized by the NRSA can get digital copies that can be imported into a GIS.

The legacy of India's myopic and restrictive map policy lives on. We keep waiting for the day it might change..

Bhoosampada makes it easier for users to get hold of good LULC data aggregated by state and district. The LULC map layer shows regional scale variability of natural resources and cropping patterns and the stats allow yearly comparisons in the changes to the land cover. All this is a definite plus point. But in the absence of any serious spatial query capabilities and supporting data sets for overlay it resembles more an online static LULC map atlas and data warehouse than a dynamic web GIS application.

I hope Bhuvan is different.

See also: Mapping India