Bookmarks for Marek Cichanski

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GEOLOGY / SCIENCE LINKS

The coolest program I've ever used on a PC is MICRODEM, written by Dr. Peter Guth of the U.S. Naval Academy. MICRODEM can be used to view both Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) and satellite images. It can do a number of things that expensive GIS packages can't do, or at least can't do without some serious kludging. This and other programs are available on Dr. Guth's website.

(A source for DEMs of the U.S. can be found here, at a site maintained by the US Geological Survey. Dr. Guth's website also has a link to this page.)

Note: The trickiest thing about using this DEM data is decompressing it, because it's both "tar"ed and "gzipped". People who've downloaded the latest version of MICRODEM report that it handles some or all of these tasks for you. You can also use WinZip, but you may need to fiddle around with the "TAR Smart CR/LF conversions" check box under Options>Configuration>Miscellaneous.
More links to digital terrain data can be found here , here, and here.



This is an interactive site that showcases a great new map that's just been published by the U.S. Geological Survey. They've combined a digital shaded relief map of the lower 48 states with a geologic map. The result shows both the topography and the ages of the rocks. This map will, hopefully, help explain what a geologic map is, and how some of the features of the Lower 48 formed.
BTW, the topography is reminiscent of the classic Thelin and Pike digital shaded relief map, first distributed in 1991, but isn't quite the same. The new map actually uses a slightly inferior topographic image. The Thelin and Pike map is worth looking at, for a lesson in how much can be learned from topography alone.
This is basically an online version of the new Geology of the North Cascades book (see Geology/Mountain Books). It provides a lot of great information about the North Cascades and general geology.
Snowball Earth
This picture shows sedimentary rocks in Namibia that contain evidence for what may be the Earth's greatest episodes of global climate change. Exciting new work in stratigraphy and geochemistry suggest that on at least two previous occasions, the earth's climate has cooled drastically - to the point that the oceans froze over and the Earth became an "ice planet". The end of the first "Snowball Earth" episode, about 2.5 billion years ago, may have been the cause of the earth's present oxygen-rich atmosphere, and the end of the second, about 600 million years ago, may have triggered the rise of complex animal life, which eventually led to us. The magntiude of global climate change that worries us now is a drop in the bucket compared to some of the things that the Earth has gone through without our help. (Be glad we're not heading into another Snowball Earth - then we'd REALLY be worried!) This web article is by Paul Hoffman of Harvard University. (Don't roll your eyes when you see how text-heavy it is. Give it a read, and there are links to images at the bottom of the article.)
Holyrood Park Geology
Anyone who's taken my Geology 10 class has heard the name of James Hutton more often than they'd probably care to remember. Hutton had some of the most important insights in geology, such as the realization that coarse-grained igneous rocks form by cooling from a molten state while underground. The classic locality where he demonstrated this is called "Hutton's Section", on the Salisbury Crags above the city of Edinburgh, Scotland. The geology of this area is described in this website.


SETI@home. Thousands (millions?) of ordinary people around the world are now involved in the search for extraterrestrial civilizations, and have collectively created the world's largest computer. SETI@home is a project out of UC Berkeley that gives you a small program and a chunk of data. When your computer goes into screen saver mode, it searches the data for potentially significant signals. I must admit, however, that my expectations have been somewhat tempered by reading the book Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe. See the Other Science page under Book Recommendations.
Some structural geology software is listed at SoftStructure.
Another great Internet document is Geodesy for the Layman, which explains all (and I mean all) of the gory "behind the scenes" details that go into making maps.
Doug Walker's website at the U. of Kansas has geologic maps on the web, which is an exciting idea. If we (as field geologists) can digitize our maps into GIS format, we can disseminate them on the web!

Mountain / Outdoor Links

Here's a page with reviews of outdoor gear.
The GeoImages page at U.C. Berkeley has great images of landscapes around the world. Check out their Virtual Reality Panoramas!

A store called Northern Mountain Supply has a pretty comprehensive list of outdoor links.
My favorite backpacks are made by Macpac, a New Zealand company. If you ever have to hike in the rain, I recommend investing in one of these babies. Unlike U.S. pack manufacturers, who are all based in places where it never rains, (i.e. Colorado and California) the Kiwis at Macpac get hosed on pretty regularly. Consequently, their packs actually have some degree of waterproofness! With the exchange rate, I've gotten pretty good deals, even after shipping and handling. (The tent designs seem pretty groovy, too, with features like a fly that gets pitched first - something that doesn't seem to have occurred to the folks in Berkeley...)

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