Earth Matters

Welcome to Earth Matters, the news and notes blog of Earth Observatory. And welcome to an ongoing conversation about our amazing planet. Earth Matters will be composed by the science writers, data visualizers, and web developers of Earth Observatory and of NASA’s Earth Science News Team. We are former journalists and scientists, communications majors and […]

In response to Map of the Ancient Mississippi a few of you left comments to the effect of “no one should live in floodplains.” It’s an appealing notion, but I think it’s unrealistic. Anne Jefferson of Highly Allochthonous published an epic post yesterday outlining the benefits and risks of building in a flood plain, and […]

Sticking to the flood theme, here’s a recent map from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers showing the predicted travel time for water in the Morganza Floodway. It’s a reasonably good map, with one big flaw: the colors are more appropriate for categorical data (such as a geological map of different rock types) rather than […]

While poking around looking for imagery of the 1973 flooding on the Mississippi, I discovered some fascinating, very high resolution aerial photography. Images of Morgan City—a community near the mouth of the Atchafalaya River that was damaged by flooding in 1973, and will likely be hit by rising water in the next few weeks. Both […]

Historic flooding along the Mississippi River gives me an excuse to show another of my favorite maps, from Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River. Each color represents an old channel, dating back 1,000 years or so. Those that correspond to historical records are dated, while older channels are ordered according […]

Last week, Jessica Ball of the American Geophysical Union’s Magma Cum Laude blog pointed out this map of natural hazards in the U.S., published by the New York Times: The map has many of the design virtues common in graphics from the Times (clean, focused on the data, clearly labeled, small multiples), but when I […]

One of the best things about international travel (at least to a geek like me) is to see how different cultures approach design and signage. Here’s a few from Blue Mountains National Park, near Sydney, Australia.

Four erupting volcanoes on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula are visible in a single satellite image.

Poorly chosen map projections can be very misleading, as demonstrated by the claim that “most” of the Northern Hemisphere was covered in snow and ice in early February.