Department of Geography - Banaras Hindu University

Today is the first day of 3-days long Geo-Fest 2019 celebrations. Here are the few snaps from all the events viz. essay, quiz and debate competition.

We are excited to announce that Department of Geography, Institute of Science, Banaras Hindu University is going to organize a youth Competition as GEO-FEST 2019 on the occasion of 73rd Foundation Day of the department (16th July). In this reference, All the Geography students (present/alumni), be it Graduate, PG, Diploma students or Research scholars/PDFs, from the main campus as well as south campus and afflicted colleges are cordially invited to participate in all programs.

To register, please call or DM on whatsaap at +91-9452441529/9455233162/9918044785/8604596273
Last date of Registration: 12 July 2019 (till 11:00 PM)
Language: Hindi and English
Prize distribution: 16 July 2019
Venue: Department of Geography, Institute of Science, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi - 221005

Note - Feel free to participate as there isn't any participation charge.

भौगोलिक शोध-प्रक्रिया के दौरान सांख्यिकीय विधियों के SPSS सॉफ्टवेयर में इस्तेमाल एवं भौगोलिक सूचना प्रणाली(GIS) के आधारभूत संकल्पनाओं व प्राथमिक विधियों का ArcGiS/QGIS में सरल संपादन हेतु दो-सप्ताह(22 जुलाई से 5 अगस्त, 2019) की राष्ट्रीय कार्यशाला का भूगोल विभाग, काशी हिन्दू विश्वविद्यालय के द्वारा आयोजन किया जा रहा है।

भूगोल में शोधरत इच्छुक विद्यार्थी उक्त कार्यशाला में पंजीकरण हेतु निर्धारित प्रक्रिया के तहत आवेदन कर सकते हैं। विस्तृत सूचना के लिए अनुलग्नकों का सावधानीपूर्वक अवलोकन अपेक्षित है। धन्यवाद्।

Interesting map I found on Reddit showing the largest Asian minority groups of the Americas. has hands down the largest Japanese community outside of whereas you can see remnants of former colonial ties with having Indonesians through the Dutch empire and as the once being under US control

Blooming Gibraltar

Blooming Gibraltar

From space, the Strait of Gibraltar appears tiny compared to the continents it separates. At the strait’s narrowest point, Africa stands just 14 kilometers (9 miles) from Europe. But the narrow waterway is a complex environment that gives rise to striking phytoplankton blooms when conditions are right.

Water conditions and circulation near the strait produced a bloom with colorful tendrils visible in this image, acquired on March 8, 2017. The image is composed from data acquired with the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on Suomi NPP, and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. A series of processing steps were applied to highlight color differences and bring out the bloom’s subtler features.

The intricate swirls of phytoplankton trace the patterns of water flow, which in this region can become quite turbulent. For example, water moving east from the North Atlantic into the Mediterranean Sea has created turbulence in the form of internal waves. These waves—sometimes with heights up to 100 meters—occur primarily deep within the ocean, with just a mere crest poking through the surface. At the same time, water flowing west helps stir up water in the North Atlantic, including the Golfo de Cádiz.

While most of the swirls of color are phytoplankton, ocean scientist Norman Kuring of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center notes that some of the color near coastal areas could be due to sediment suspended in the water, particularly near the mouths of rivers. Some of the yellow-green plume near the Guadalquivir River, for example, could be due to colored dissolved organic matter (CDOM).

“My guess is that there is less suspended sediment along the Iberian and African coastlines than you might expect to find in eastern U.S. coastal waters, which overlay a broader continental shelf than what is found around Iberia,” Kuring said.

https://go.nasa.gov/2oZknle

Geopolitics of Nuclear weapons

3 Maps That Explain the Geopolitics of Nuclear Weapons | Mauldin Economics John Mauldin, Financial Expert, Best-Selling Author, and Editor of Thoughts from the Frontline Investment Newsletter. Offering Financial & Economic Analysis, Research.

Local Sea Level Rise- one of the trickiest predictions. Part 1.

In my last post (http://on.fb.me/1advPiu
) I mentioned that sea level rise from Antarctica melting would not be distributed equally throughout the globe, and in the coming posts I'll explain why. Currently, most of sea level rise is due to thermal expansion caused by warming of the oceans, the remainder coming from melting ice and reduction of liquid water storage on land.

In the latest IPCC report, it has been suggested that sea level may rise up to a meter by 2100. This prediction is assuming that Antarctic Ice Shelves remain stable, which may not be the case (see our previous post: http://on.fb.me/1yuE5jq
). The latest IPCC report has also predicted that it is very likely that over 95% of the world’s ocean surface will rise...but what about the other 5%? Those surfaces are most likely near current and former glaciers and ice sheets. Sea level rise will be experienced very differently in different parts of the world, with deviations up to 50% from the global mean sea level projection.

Antarctica and Greenland hold the vast majority of earths freshwater and are also contributors to sea level rise. A common belief is that melting of these vast ice caps would result in uniform sea level rise. This is not the case – models have shown that such melting can actually cause a decrease in relative sea level around these regions. There are two main reasons behind this; the first one is gravity.

These ice caps (Antarctica especially) are so massive that their gravitational force pulls water towards them, much like the moon does with the ocean. This effect results in sea levels higher than they would be otherwise for thousands of kilometers around them, which means lower sea levels elsewhere. As they shrink, their gravitational pull weakens, which also lessens their hold on the surrounding water which leads to higher sea levels elsewhere.

To put some numbers on this, a researcher from Harvard calculated that if the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapsed and melted, the global mean sea level rise would be up to 5m, however it would be approximately 6.5m in various cities in the USA, and less in other areas. The image depicts findings from a 2012 paper by Sallenger and others, showing the distribution of sea level rise across the United States of America.

-MJA

Image credit: Sallenger et al., 2012.

Further reading/references:
IPCC on sea level rise: http://bit.ly/1CrvtOk

http://bit.ly/1CrvtOk

http://bit.ly/1nddrec

Sallenger Jr, A. H., Doran, K. S., & Howd, P. A. (2012). Hotspot of accelerated sea-level rise on the Atlantic coast of North America. Nature Climate Change, 2(12), 884-888.

How well do you know the world?

We all use maps. In the age of GPS and Google Maps, they're just a few taps away. But how often does your interaction with a map go beyond 'Where is the nearest coffee shop?' When did you last step back and look at the world? And what is it that you're actually looking at?

It's all a matter of perspective. For example, why is North up? The short answer is that there is no good reason - it's just the way it is. Stuart McArthur took issue with Australia being the land 'down under', and came up with his upside-down 'Universal Corrective Map' to challenge how people thought about the world.

Maps have been around for millennia. Early maps were simple diagrams of landmarks and navigational aids - a practical means of finding your way around without a guide. Their scale reflected the small worlds that people lived in. As humans began to explore the world, their horizons expanded and maps got more complex. Oceans and land masses began to take shape, but the edges of the maps were blank, warning off potential explorers with phrases like 'Here be dragons'. People thought the world was flat.

As early cartographers studied the world, they started to realise it wasn't flat. The idea of a spherical Earth began to emerge in ancient Greece, but wasn't widely adopted until the Middle Ages, and wasn't 'proved' until Magellan circumnavigated the Earth in the early 16th Century. Now we know that the Earth isn't a sphere - more of an ellipsoid, which we call an 'oblate spheroid'. This requires a complete shift in perspective, and presents an interesting problem: how do you represent the surface of an oblate spheroid on a flat map?

There are two ways to do this. The first is to 'cut up' the map, so you end up with lots of fragments, all on the same scale. This is geographically accurate, but is practically useless in the everyday world - navigating on many disjointed map fragments is a real headache. The more popular method is to stretch the surface of the sphere onto a grid. The evenly spaced lines of latitude (which circumnavigate the globe, parallel to the equator) stay the same, and you stretch out all the lines of longitude (which converge at the north to the south poles) so they are also parallel. This is the map most of you will be familiar with, and is called the Mercator projection. There are many subtle variations, but the one you will be most familiar with is the Web Mercator projection - established by Google in 2005, and now the standard for online maps.

In a Mercator projection vertical distances are correct, but as you move north or south from the equator everything is stretched horizontally. At the 'coffee shop' scale, this makes almost no difference, but at the global scale the differences are enormous. So enormous that most people's sense of how big the countries of the world are is completely wrong.

If you're wondering how well you know the world, play this little game: http://goo.gl/ekdVw

This game gives you the outlines of 15 countries, and asks you to place them on a Web Mercator map. Watch how their size and shape changes as you move them around the map. Hint: Greenland is really quite small, and all those 'little' African countries? Not that little!

- OB

Image Credit: http://goo.gl/3KMQ9u

Some funky map projections: http://goo.gl/T8omrA

The Natural Serial Killer

Vesuvius, the serial killer

Natural disasters dominate our headlines. Body counts soar and it can make us feel like unwelcomed guests on an increasingly hostile planet. Nowhere is the peril more apparent than in the shadow of a volcano.

The Earth is home to some 600+ active volcanoes; half a billion people live within their blast range. Some are known killers. Montserrat in the Caribbean, the 1997 eruption buried the nations capital in ash. Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, its 1991 blast was 10 times the size of Mount St. Helens. Active volcanoes can appear dormant, but many are in fact ticking time bombs.

Naples Italy, the uneasy neighbour of a seismic serial killer, makes it one city most likely to suffer a fiery death. Here 600,000 people live within the red zone. That’s the blast range of what’s undoubtedly the worlds most treacherous volcano: Vesuvius, a killer with a rap sheet a mile long. Its historic eruption in 79 AD entombed two entire cities, Pompeii and Herculaneum, each about as close to Vesuvius as downtown Naples. Their victims are a haunting reminder of an ancient disaster and a warming to Naples population today.

While most of the world knows the story of Pompeii, few realise just how often Vesuvius erupts. The last time was little more than a half a century ago in 1944. The allied forces had invaded Italy and were driving north; a few tremours from a quiet volcano was the last thing on their minds. For more than a week pumice, volcanic gases and searing hot ash shot out. Rivers of lava poured down the mountainside. In total it killed 26 people, the city got off easy. Which is why perhaps its lesson was seemingly ignored. Because from 1994 to 2004, those living in Vesuvius’s shadow grew to 600,000, and all the while this mass murderer is in no doubt building towards another disaster.

The city is so concerned; they’re actually paying people to leave. Officials are pleading with families to move out of the red zone, the area most likely to be devastated by the next eruption. Why haven’t people already left? Because Vesuvius like many other volcanoes that go long periods between eruptions holds a deadly attraction. Mineral rich volcanic soil creates an inviting paradise on the outside, beneath, murder broods in its molten heart.

Like Earthquakes, most active volcanoes are born from the ‘rubbing’ of tectonic plates, which brings up magma from deep beneath the Earth. Some of the volcanoes in the middle of plates aren’t as volatile. They continuously spew lava leaving the underground pressure. It is this action that somewhat stabilises the Earth. If it didn’t realise this built up pressure, it would eventually go off with one mighty bang and make Earth inhabitable for human life. Volcanoes on vaults like Vesuvius build magma and pressure for years until they erupt with explosive force.

A force of nature that’s impossible to stop. It isn’t a question of if it will happen, but when it will happen.

~ JM

Image Credit: http://bit.ly/1GGHIts

More Info:
Living in the Red Zone http://bit.ly/1wJkPmY

Vesuvius Introduction: http://bit.ly/1tmqHNJ

Mount Vesuvius, ticking time bomb: http://bbc.in/1EpVdyg

BBC News Report Video: http://bbc.in/1NtQVp7