Category: Web Resources

When directing The Greatest Story Ever Told George Stevens was unimpressed by John Wayne’s delivery of his only line at the very end of the film.  Stevens said, “You have to deliver with a little more awe, John”.  And so we have one of the great conclusions in cinema history, “Aw, he truly was…..”.  Astronauts have had a fair number of those “Aw” moments, and thankfully, most have them have carried cameras.  They captured a great many views of odd and awesome phenomena and features of the Earth as they passed over. There are a great many (around 400 thousand), and NASA has compiled the best views of Earth’s surface on its new site at  http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/EFS/.  I put in “faults” to see what came up; there were 184 images from every continent.  Downloads are in two sizes, 300 kb and 13 Mb, so the images are of very high quality.   The entire archive is searchable at http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/.

The US Geological Survey has placed 16 thousand of its archived field photographs on the web, at print-quality resolution.  They can be accessed at http://libraryphotos.er.usgs.gov and carry no copyright, so anyone can use them for illustration of lectures or textbooks (it would be polite to acknowledge the USGSs generosity).  The photos date back to the earliest days of geological research in the United States, and are in black and white, and colour.  Although still under development, the site’s search engine works well and quickly.  Putting in “unconformity” and “thrust” yielded 31 and 52 pictures, respectively.  However, trying to find the highly photogenic thrust of grey Cambrian limestones over Permian redbeds west of Las Vegas in Nevada drew a surprising blank.  Every geological survey holds enormous archives of photographs that never see the light, so the USGS initiative ought to encourage others to follow suit.  In particular, it would be great news if the British Geological Survey, the world’s oldest, did likewise, instead of just generating a meagre flow of funds by selling a minute proportion of its collection as postcards.

Dave Reay of the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh has developed an extremely useful website that covers all the breaking news about “greenhouse” gases and climate change at www.ghgonline.org, which is easy to navigate and regularly updated.  It contains links to on-line publications and a comprehensive Links page.

The Digital Library for Earth Systems Education now has a site that can act as a gateway to thousands of Earth Science web sites that provide educational materials from school to professional level (www.dlese.org) .  There is a comprehensive range of topics, and a potentially useful enhancement is part which announces conferences and discussion groups.

Devonian art

The Devonian Period witnessed sudden diversification of vertebrate animals, including the first amphibians.  The oceans were teeming with other life forms.  Museums have for a long while commissioned artists to create dioramas of ancient seas that express part of their diversity.  Using gaming software, British artist Christian Darkin is in the process of developing an interactive Devonian diorama, eventually intended for museum use.  His work in progress can be viewed at   www.geocities.com/christiandarki/fish.htm .  You will need the Macromedia Shockwave plug in, downloadable direct from Darkin’s site, and a higher speed connection than with a normal modem.  However, the experience is dramatic and informative.

If so, the site to visit is at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( www.jpl.nasa.gov/temlates/flash/neo/neo.htm ).  The Near Earth Objects team has designed the site for general education about the kinds of space chunks that might strike, the risks involved and what will probably happen when we get very unlucky.

CCTV not only infests every street, trunk road and office block, but is beginning to be trained on volcanoes.  The US Geological Survey maintains a web site that links to more than 40 Webcams pointed at active volcanoes, including St Helen’s, Fuji, Ruapehu and Etna (vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Photo/volcano_cams.html).  So, volcanologists, make sure your sensors, hard hats and reflective suits are packed, ready to go.  You can keep an eye out for your volcano starting to blow, even as you are eating your Rice Crispies!

United States geological database

As well as organising its geographic information, including topographic maps and digital elevation data, into a seamless browseable whole (Brown, K, 2002.  Mapping the future.  Science, v. 298, p. 1874-1875), the US Geological Survey has launched a national geological database from which anyone can download a vast amount of information in 100 categories (geode.usgs.gov).

Landsat images as art

A new web site at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center landsat.gsfc.nasa.gove/earthasart enables you to view, download and order some of the most dramatic and aesthetically pleasing images captured by the Landsat programme.

Among the many regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, that spanning microwaves most easily penetrates the atmosphere.  Most people are familiar with radar images, produced by actively illuminating the Earth’s surface with microwaves.  However, the Earth also radiates microwaves, depending on surface temperature.  A great deal of information can be gleaned from this upwelling radiation, about surface temperature and at different levels in the atmosphere, rainfall, wind speed and soil moisture.  NASA, in partnership with several US universities, has launched public access to passive microwave data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission and NOAA-15 satellites at pm-esip.nsstc.nasa.gov .  Data go back 5 years, and include comparisons of daily air temperatures with the 20-year average.

The department’s site combines high-quality educational media and scientific data about those environmental aspects of Florida that are unique.  You can access downloadable AutoCAD *.dxf files showing geological maps from the county level to smaller scales plus other GIS files, lithological logs from boreholes and detailed information on the State’s oil and gas industry.  Currently featured on its home page is a related web site about Florida’s unique hydrogeology and its famous springs.  A well-designed, easy to use site.

Researchers at Cornell University have been compiling digital maps of a wide range of data for the last 8 years.  The Digital Earth project’s web site is http://atlas.geo.ecornell.edu .  There, it is possible not only to download various data sets for use in a GIS, and to track down primary sources for data, but also to build your own maps.  Digital Earth comprises over 100 data sets, on global, regional and North American scales, that include geographical, geological and geophysical themes.  The mapping tool takes a while to get used to, and runs slowly with a 56k connection, but should behave well with broadband access.  I tested the tools by creating a geological map of NE Africa.  This was pleasingly up to date and showed moderate detail, but the lack of a legend is something of a drawback.  Understandably, the level of stratigraphic division is limited, so that all Precambrian areas appear in the same colour.  Similar detail is not yet available for Europe, only a coarser resolution world geology data set covering it.  Downloads are in either Postscript or jpeg form, the latter suffering from artefacts generated by compression.   This is a site well worth a visit.

Scientists without access to libraries that subscribe to scientific journals, or whose institutions are poorly funded, are cut off from the mainstream of research developments.  That is, unless they request offprints of papers from authors.  The growth of electronic versions of journals and increasing access to the Web, even in poor countries (Eritrea recently went “on-line”) seemed to promise wider availability of primary sources of research information.  That is an illusion.  Unless you are a subscriber to paper journals (for instance Nature and Science subscribers automatically get free access to on-line versions) or are registered with a library that has subscribed to all electronic journals made available by a publishing house, such as Elsevier’s Science Direct, then downloading more than an abstract is on a pay-per-view basis.  (Note:  even the Web of Science, that hosts the Science Citation Index database, requires a paid-for user id and password).  Being a university academic in a rich country, I have the luxury of free access to many electronic resources through the Open University Library’s subscriptions, and the same goes for any of our students.  However, the economic facts of academic life occasionally rear up.  A reference to an interesting paper in the Journal of Human Evolution came to my attention.  Using my id and password for the publisher’s web site, I was able to locate the entry for the paper.  However, we do not subscribe to that journal, and to download an Adobe Acrobat PDF file would have cost me about £35, charged to my credit card.  Instead I requested an offprint from the authors, and am still waiting for its arrival after 2 months.

Authors provide papers free of charge to publishers of journals, referees review submissions without payment, and many editors compile issues for little if any return, other than satisfaction and kudos.  Publishers of journals make enormous profits, and increase subscriptions at rates far above that of inflation (one veterinary science journal increased in price by 7 time between 1991 and this year).  The average total income received by publishers of the roughly 20 000 scientific journals for each one of the 2 million papers published each year is around US$2 000 – the trade has a US$4 billion annual income.  In the Earth sciences annual subscriptions are beyond the budgets of most 3^rd World institutions (6 issues of Elsevier’s Journal of African Earth Sciences cost £1003), apart from a few (the University of Chicago’s Journal of Geology costs £79 per annum).

The Public Library of Science  – http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org -is campaigning for a way out of the increasing cost for freedom of access to scientific information.  One simple and foolproof strategy is for authors to “self-archive” their preprints and manuscripts of published papers in their institutions’ “e-print” archive in such a way that they can then all be harvested into a global virtual archive, its full contents freely searchable and accessible online by anyone.  Stevan Harnad of the University of Southampton is one of the driving forces for the self-archiving initiative, and provides full details of the possibilities at http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/nature4.htm

See also:  Harnad, S.  2001.  First Person: In the name of freedom.  New Scientist, 26 May 2001, p. 53.

Richard Robinson of Santa Monica College, California has provided a web site bulging with links to useful resources, including virtual field excursions that cover many different aspects of geology that range from modern environments to structural geology and tectonics.

http://homepage.smc.edu/robinson_richard/geologycentral.htm