The Geography Blog focusing on all things geography: human, physical, technical, space, news, and geopolitics. Also known as Geographic Travels with Catholicgauze!
Written by a former National Geographic employee who also proudly served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Lately there has been a rash of news stories about basketballs, motorcycles, and even fishing boats from Japan washing up on the shores of Canada and the United States. I overheard a news report claiming that the bulk of Japanese 2011 Tsunami debris is about to crash upon the beaches of the United States. That is not true. The majority of debris sank off the coast of Japan and the bulk of that still is still floating is making its way to the United States and Canada but still has some distance and time to go before it beaches or begins to float back to Asia.
From NOAA. Click to enlarge
According to NOAA's Marine Debris Program most of the floating debris is north of Midway Island and the Hawaiian Islands. What is coming ashore are high windage items, things easily blown by the wind. Medium and low windage items will be washing up on shore for about three years before the currents begin to take the debris towards Micronesia and Asia.
Time map of where and when the debris will float to. From NOAA. Click to enlarge.
For those want to help out with monitoring Japanese Tsunami debris and beach debris in general can take an active role by downloading NOAA's official beach debris reporting app (for Android and Apple) and report any finds.
The online comic xkcd has made another geography-related post which shows underwater and underground depths to scale. The chart is as massive as it is fascinating, be sure to click to enlarge to full size. Some of the fascinating things I have learned are
The emperor penguin can dive deeper than an Ohio class nuclear submarine can. The leatherback turtle can outdo them all, though.
The Edmund Fitzgerald, the Kursk, and the Lusitania all sank in water shallower than the ships were long.
James Cameron is lucky he has not been eaten by giant squid.
The Soviet Union's Kola Borehole is the most interesting geology project I never heard of.
Part of geography is studying other places. Places we know little about need to be explored. Exploring, field research, getting the boots muddy, or whatever one wants to call it can be the funnest part of research. Director and explorer James Cameron got to experience this fun by becoming the first person on a solo trip to explore the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest place on Earth.
Map of the Mariana Trench with Challenger Deep's diving spot located. From Wikipedia
To celebrate this achievement, watch this short clip he released of the lunar like landscape he saw. (If you want more you'll have to wait until his pricy documentary is released)
The trench is one of the biggest geographical features on Earth. The dimension of the trench are 35,800 feet (10,910 meters) deep, 1,580 miles (2,500 kilometers) long, and 43 miles (69 kilometers) wide.
Cameron's exploration beats my by far my personal submarine diving best of a hundred or so feet off the Cayman Wall next to the Cayman Islands.
"The underwater giant: The river, shown with a 3D scan using false color, flows along the bed of the Black Sea" - The Daily Mail
Back in middle school (about sixth grade) I was involved in a school activity which looked at a computer model of a underwater river bed in the Gulf of Mexico formed by water that rushed from the Mississippi River. That was the only experience I had with underwater rivers until the latest news story about British scientists discovering an active underground river.
The river is actually the continuation of the Bosphorus Strait as it pours water from the Mediterranean Sea into the Black Sea. The water from the Mediterranean is heavier because of its higher salt content and therefore sinks to the bottom. The force of the water digs into the soft Black Sea floor creating a river channel. The so far unnamed river is huge: up to 115 feet (35 meters) deep and half a mile (.8 kilometers) wide. This combined with the amount of water flowing through the river channel make the underwater river the sixth largest river in the world.
A neat thing to know about the underwater river is that it even has rapids and waterfalls! The ocean and seas are the world's last frontiers. Geographers who focus in oceanography are filling in the last "blank", actually blue, spots in the map. However, there is plenty of more spots to explore so if one wants to do on Earth discovers then oceanography may be up one's alley.
