Yes, 95% of Earth’s living space is underwater. Most at depths with no light and near freezing temperatures.

Links
- XKCD.com
- Seth Dixon
- The Smithsonian Institution
- Challenger Deep
- Kola Borehole [ Deepest Hole ever drilled]

Yes, 95% of Earth’s living space is underwater. Most at depths with no light and near freezing temperatures.


Max Galka [@galka_max] on global population densities.
Just 5% of the world lives in the entire blue area. Another 5% lives in the red area.
Good to see discussion of Gall-Peters v Mercator. I sit with Gall-Peters when a globe is not available!. [Am pretty sure the GTAV were one of the first to introduce this in the 80’s… had one in my classroom in 1987!]

Well, if you live in Australia, then don’t worry, you might be about 1.5 metres “off”.
A team from GEOSCIENCE Australia are about to recalculate the nation’s latitude and longitude coordinates, which are currently out by more than 1.5 metres.
Australia sits on the fastest moving continental tectonic plate in the world, thus coordinates measured in the past continue changing over time.
The continent is moving north by about 7 centimetres each year, colliding with the Pacific Plate, which is moving west about 11 centimetres each year.
It will improve the accuracy of all spatial information across the nation for a myriad of services including transportation, personal navigation and surveying.
GNSS stations consist of permanent geodetic quality GPS receivers, on geologically stable marks, with eight stations within Australia known as the Australian Fiducial Network (AFN) . These stations provide the geodetic framework for the spatial data infrastructure in Australia and its territories. They also provide input for the measurement of earth processes, such as crustal dynamics and sea level rise.

Europe is experiencing the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. Based on data from the United Nations, the LUCIFY group clarify the scale of the crisis with a stunning piece of visualisation.

Its not a long time, twenty-five years.
ESRI [ @Esri ] has produced some excellent comparative analyses of Human activities that are reshaping the Earth’s surface using 1990 Landsat imagery [left] and Esri’s World Imagery basemap [right]


Perspective is a wonderful thing.
Africa Dwarfs China, Europe and the U.S.
Scientific American – [Paywall]

The telegeography group do some great maps.
These two remind us of the very tenuous links that are in fact the basis of all of Australia’s modern communication and much of its commerce.
As much economic and perhaps cultural connections too.
The VOX published a great piece earlier last month relating the modern cables to the ancient trade routes.
They point out:
Cables lying on the seafloor bring the internet to the world. They transmit 99 percent of international data, make transoceanic communication possible in an instant, and serve as a loose proxy for the international trade that connects advanced economies.

Have you ever dropped a stick in a river and wondered where it might go?

For those among us either hydrologically and/or geomorphologically challenged, the new US National Atlas presents “Streamer”, another excellent instalment in “Gov 2.0” initiatives.
The work of policy-makers, planners, geographers and geographic information experts to visualise the complex inter-relationships between drainage basins, communities and entire nation-wide catchments is another positive step forward for near-real-time evidence based planning so critical to sound, long-term planning.
This is a new interactive web map that allows you to explore America’s streams by tracing upstream to their source or downstream to where they empty. Users can learn more about stream traces and the places they pass through in brief or detailed reports.
Murray-Darling?