Oblate Spheroid

Chairing a session at a scientific meeting has its advantages and disadvantages. One of the major disadvantages is that you miss out on a half day’s worth of talks (at least, you do at GSA, where the sessions last a half day; they’re shorter at AGU). Although I got to see some cool stuff this [...]

Writing this from my room at the fabulous McMenamin’s Kennedy School (the only hotel I’ve ever stayed in with chalkboards in the rooms, four bars, and a movie theater…) after a rather successful Pardee session at the 2009 GSA. Among the highlights:

There seems to be a growing push for a sort of crowdsourcing in geology [...]

It’s the week before the Geological Society of America annual meeting. AAAAGGGH!!!!
Here’s a preview of what I’m working on:

Google Earth image with 1940 aerial image overlay (and grid) showing Puyallup River valley between Puyallup and Tacoma. Image from Puget Sound River History Project.

As environmental science instructors, we like to hope we can get our students [...]

Because I’m from Pasadena, I’ve been keeping a close eye on what’s been going on with the Station fire. This is the one that’s been burning in the San Gabriel Mountains north of the LA basin for the past week or so. Because the fire is threatening a lot of places I know pretty well, [...]

The San Diego State Geo Department has changed their KML page to include (among some other stuff) a geologic map symbol generator that should be useful to geologists distributing info in Google Earth.

[This is an announcement I'll be sending out shortly to a number of sites. I believe Kyle has posted it to his blog. I'm not sure whether Ron (blogs here and here and here) has done so yet. Pass it on!]
We are pleased to announce a pair of sessions at the 2009 GSA meeting in [...]

Google Earth 5.0 Launch Event
It’s not just a fun demo. It’s not just a narrative. – Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google

Google Ocean is here. Sure enough, you can dive down and see bathymetry! I’m still getting used to it, so these are just first impressions from tooling around for 10 minutes:
It sure is spooky down here. The lighting is obviously unrealistic, which is good (you wouldn’t be able to see this at all if you [...]

Reports circulating in the blogosphere (summarized at Ogle Earth) indicate that Google will make a big Earth-related announcement on February 2 at the Cal Academy in San Francisco. These reports say that oceanographer Sylvia Earle will top a list of luminaries including Al Gore and some of the bigwigs from Google. Earle’s presence may mean [...]

Kurt Schwehr (blogging at Kurt’s Weblog) posted something a couple of days ago about the recently updated pseudo-bathymetry on Google Earth (see the graphics and broader discussion at Ogle Earth, too). Dave Sandwell (David T. Sandwell, to be precise…) wrote to Kurt with some clarifications about data sources. In passing, Sandwell mentions an easter egg [...]