Far from merely inducing or aggravating a pathology for RSSpectating in global disaster events, the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System “combines existing web-based disaster information management systems with the aim to alert the international community in case of major sudden-onset disasters and to facilitate the coordination of international response during the relief phase of the disaster.” Although unless you have access to their alert-notification and interactive components (e.g. Virtual OSOCC), you will probably just end up fetishising humanitarian crisis into another Edward Tufte poster.
And there's also UNOSAT, a United Nations programme whose goal is “to make satellite imagery and geographic information easily accessible to the humanitarian community and to experts worldwide working to reduce disasters and plan sustainable development.”
For instance this map assessing the wholesale destruction of housing and businesses in Harare, Zimbabwe during Mugabe's urbicidal Operation Murambatsvina.
A trailing suction hopper dredger, or TSHD, is the sort of seafaring vessel you would want to buy if you plan to rehabilitate dying beaches, fortify riverbanks, recontour ports and harbors, construct offshore multi-terminal airports or send marauding bacterio-peninsulas to unsuspecting shorelines.
It should surprise no one, then, that we want to comandeer about a dozen of them. If Michael Heizer had his bulldozers and James Turrell is having fun with his tunnel boring machines, we should be able to play around with our own earth-moving machines.
As but one of certainly many possibilities, we could use them to stage an utterly marvelous water show in the grand tradition of the naumachia, those monumental re-enactments in Ancient Rome of epic naval battles. Obviously, we would first need to reincarnate Busby Berkeley to help with the script, tentatively titled Adventures on the Continental Shelf.
In semi-accordance with ancient practices, it will be performed entirely by a cast of quasi-slaveworkers from Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Bangladesh. The Army Corps of Engineers will help with the art direction, and the Naval War College will provide the choreography.
Months later the ridiculously wealthy and the grotesquely (in)famous will head off to Abu Dhabi (Dubai is so old news) for the world premier. With their 67-course Alinea dinner finished and the Veuve Clicquot now flowing freely, they will watch the armada glide across the moonlit Persian Gulf in interlacing figure eights and arabesque battle formations, arcing chunks of the mantle and patterning a frothy trail within sights of U.S. aircraft carriers and heavy battlecruisers guarding vital oil shipping lanes. A hydrological fantasie staged in a geopolitical minefield.
Stone against metal against water. Their bones will tremble with the ambient vibrations.
It's better than the Bellagio, they will say to themselves. Because any slight misalignment of the nozzle and their heads get sandblasted off from their torsos.
During intermission, someone will go up to a group of totalitarian dictators awaiting their future micronations and ask, was Pruned inspired by the Battle of Leyte Gulf?
The next day, hung over and with a mouthful of grit, they will step onto their manmade continent and set about showing those petulant Modernists and New Urbanists the proper way to build a thriving city without the ahistorical mimicry.
Or maybe it's a game. You are given a tiny speck of an island and there waiting for you is a set of groynes, sea walls, revetments, rip raps, gabions, breakers and a multi-billion dollar levee system. The challenge is in the assembly (perhaps Ikea would like to sign on as a sponsor), and whoever keeps their island above sea level the longest, wins.
Meanwhile, in case you're wondering, a trailing suction hopper dredger operates very much like a floating vacuum cleaner. With a single or twin proboscis-like suction pipes, it pumps up materials from the sea floor and then discharges them into a storage compartment known as the hopper. You wouldn't find a land version of the TSHD cruising the arid expanses of the Arabian Peninsula sucking up desert sand, because apparently, unlike sand taken from the bottom of the ocean, desert sand isn't materially and structurally suitable for making artificial islands.
After filling up its hopper, the dredger would then sail to the disposal site where it unloads its cargo either by 1) opening the doors or valves in the hopper bottom; 2) using a pipeline running from the ship to the site; 3) or using a special bow jet. This last technique is known as rainbowing.
In case you're wondering as well, most of the dredgers shown in this post are owned by Van Oord, purportedly the largest dredging company in the world. The others are either owned by Boskalis, Jan de Nul or Dredging International.
Would it surprise anyone to learn that these four companies are based in the Netherlands and Belgium, that these two countries — most of whose territories were reclaimed from the seas — have a near monopoly in TSHDs?
Standing beneath a roaring froth of regurgitated geology. Loveliness.
In lieu of a set of Prunings, here's the first entry for our new irregular feature, Postscripts.
#1: Vis-à-vis Hu Yang's photodocumentary on Shanghai living, see Michael Wolf's own investigation into density in Hong Kong.
#2: Remember how we were hysterically lamenting over the demise of the ACEMVD's Visual Images Database? Apparently, it wasn't defunct; it was simply being moved to a new server.
#3: And remember Hal the Coyote? He died only a week after his capture just as he was being prepared for release. Cause of death: “heartworm infection and internal bleeding caused by his ingestion of rodent poison,” which were exacerbated by the “stress of captivity and handling during the release.” Poor fella.
#4: The first Edible Estate was in Salina, Kansas. For the second Fritz Haeg chose a site owned by the Foti Family in Los Angeles. And then The New York Times came for a visit.
#5: After reading our post on the Leidenfrost Fountain, phronesisaical reminisced about their trip to Nepal where they encountered water moving uphill.
Here's another music video, or rather a flash animation. It's Lord Whimsy for Momus acting the part of an interplanetary Linnaeus on another of his transdimensional horticultural expeditions. Captain Nemo seems to have had the lesser fantastic voyage.
Some have speculated this to be a video of a newly discovered breeding ground for the next generation of Superviruses. Amidst the steam and din of the jungle, roboticized tendrils fold HIV into Ebloa intermingling with SARS-polio hybrids. But many believe it's a covert recording of an arboretum tended to by a reclusive multi-billionaire Dubai sheik intent on invasively populating The World. Still others think it's the long lost Garden of Earthly Delights, the setting to so many of Don Aguirre's pederastic hilarious trysts with Alice Dr. Moreau. No one, however, wants to consider that it's just a music video by 1st Avenue Machines for Alias' “Sixes Last.”
This lifetime field list of geologic sites were intended for geologists, but we see no reason why landscape architects cannot appropriate it as a pedagogical tool. So copy and paste, add a tick box besides each item, and off you go.
No doubt this will take decades to complete, but fear not, Pruned will still be here in the next century and beyond to oversee this challege. Be sure to send journal notes, photographs, hospital injury reports, death certificates, etc.
If you simply must be alerted whenever an earthquake erupts halfway across the globe, or for that matter just about anywhere, then head on over to the USGS Earthquake Center and subscribe to one or all of their RSS feeds. New landscapes and extinguished geographies syndicated and delivered to you in real-time.
Some weeks ago Pruned discovered Chicago's North Avenue Beach — and its tideless, shimmering blue-green waters; its unsalted offshore breezes; nearby multi-billion dollar seawalls as sculpted by the Army Corps of Engineers; the immigrant lakefill; and Lake Michigan's low E. coli count.
Clearly there were just too much to keep us entrenched along the shoreline and away from our blog. But we simply have to come back and share with our readers this satellite image of the groynes seemingly jutting out like spinal projections from Lake Shore Drive to keep the relentlessly drifting sand at bay.
These are the self-replicating, self-similar geology of the city's mercurial edge.
Groynes, or groins, are built to control and modify beach erosion. Usually constructed perpendicular to the shoreline and with timber pilings, steel sheet pilings, concrete and/or rock barriers, they act as dams to block the flow of sediment. Unfortunately, this also reduces sand replenishment on the downdrift side, necessitating the construction of another groyne. And then another and then another and then another, conceivably down the entire stretch of coast, domino-like.
Which really makes us wonder what monumental earthen hydrotactics will be devised to fight off the coming post-glacial Flood. And whether they'll set up the opening scenes for La Jetée II.
