When my son Mike was at DePaul getting his degree in Geography, he took classes to be certified in GIS technology. At first I thought he was talking about GPS, the maps people, which seemed to me to have something to do with Geography. I am still living in the sixties when studying geography in grade school meant coloring maps of Europe. Nowadays, geography is a whole lot more and Mike would (patiently) explain what it was he was studying.
Esri is a company that a geography major might work for. In their words,
"Geography connects our many cultures and societies and influences our way of life. Esri is built on the philosophy that a geographic approach to problem solving ensures better communication and collaboration.
Geographic information system (GIS) technology leverages this geographic insight to address social, economic, business, and environmental concerns at local, regional, national, and global scales."
They have offices all over the world, including a satellite office in Chicago. Their corporate headquarters are in Redlands, California. At their website, they have an interactive map (shown below) that I think gives some idea of what geography is about today.
If you click on the map, it will take you to a map of Japan that allows you to see the destruction that took place there. Each of the orange dots is an earthquake. When you click on an orange dot, it tells you where, when and the magnitude of the tremor, for example,
Earthquake: near the east coast of Honshu, Japan
Magnitude: 5.0
Date and time: 2011-3-12 20:8:25 UTC
If you connect to a blue dot with an exclamation point in it, you get some related information:
Description: Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant. On March 13, the IAEA reported that the first (i.e., lowest) state of emergency was declared. Later on March 13, the IAEA reported that radioactivity levels returned to normal levels.
Each dot is geographically accurate, so you get a feel where the worst things happened.
But one of the most interesting things is that if you click on one of the red/white you tube logos, you get a video shot by someone at that location. It takes a few seconds for the video to pop up, so be patient. With the prevalence of cell phones in Japan, many people shot videos of what was happening to them. These are some of the same videos that popped up on the news, but there are a lot more here.
If you zoom in on the map, you get more detail of what is going on.
From Esri:
"The goal of this web site is to disseminate information widely, inform the general public of the worst hit areas, and facilitate recovery planning. Map layers are being added over time as more data becomes available."
Pretty amazing. Thanks, geographers.
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