An über hydromechanical complex is set to rise in the Everglades when “engineers next month will begin building one of the world's largest manmade reservoirs - the size of a small city - as efforts continue to restore natural water flow to the Everglades,” the Associated Press via Wired Newsreports.
The “flagship” project of a multi-decade, multi-billion dollar wetland restoration initiative, this staggeringly huge theatrum machinarum, “roughly 25 square miles in area, is set for completion in 2010. It will hold 62 billion gallons of water, equivalent to about 5.1 million residential swimming pools, and will be seven miles across at its widest point.”
It's so vast, in fact, that it will lower water levels at the much, much bigger Lake Okeechobee. And “when you stand on one side of this reservoir, you will not see the other side.”
Moreover, “most reservoirs are built amid mountains and valleys or where a natural water source feeds the pool. In this case, 30 million tons of earth will be dug from flat land and surrounded by a 26-foot high, 21-mile long levee, making it larger than any other reservoir not connected to a natural source.”
If you are as thoroughly fascinated in wetlands and wetland restorations as we are, make sure you stop by the South Florida Water Management District. To simultaneously satisfy your inner civil engineer and verify that the whole thing isn't merely Michael Heizer recreating Tenochtitlan, you can download all manner of plans and reports at Acceler8. But make sure you read the article though.
“There are too many Grand Canyons,” declared Lucy Lippard. “There is the place itself and its staggering geography—the rims, the river in the Inner Gorge, the maze of side canyons, mesas, plateaus, forests, arroyos, vegetation and wildlife, and all those hoodoos, columns and spires (so-called by 19th-century devotees of the Church of the Wilderness). There is the no-nonsense (and topographically nonsensical) governmental gridding of ungriddable lands as the frontier fell away. There are the variously perceived canyons through which flow the never-ending verbiage that attempts but never succeeds in seeing, let alone describing, this sight of sights. And at a deeper level, there are the interpreted canyons, the contested canyons. From these emerge our individual and collective psyches, reflected in the geographies of national history and personal experience. The abysses are epitomized by fundamentally divergent views of place and nature expressed by the Canyon’s Native peoples and by the ruling ethics of the National Park and Forest Services, themselves often at loggerheads.” And now, to add to its “macro-microcosmic multiplicity” that “staggers retina and rhetoric,” this gorgeous spectrally lit 3D view from the South Rim. Georgia O'Keefe spaceborne with an Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer.
From NASA's Visible Earth: “These three false-color images demonstrate some of the applications of remote sensing in precision farming. The goal of precision farming is to improve farmers’ profits and harvest yields while reducing the negative impacts of farming on the environment that come from over-application of chemicals. The images were acquired by the Daedalus sensor aboard a NASA aircraft flying over the Maricopa Agricultural Center in Arizona. The top image shows the color variations determined by crop density (also referred to as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, or NDVI), where dark blues and greens indicate lush vegetation and reds show areas of bare soil. The middle image is a map of water deficit, derived from the Daedalus’ reflectance and temperature measurements. Greens and blues indicate wet soil and reds are dry soil. The bottom image shows where crops are under serious stress, as is particularly the case in Fields 120 and 119 (indicated by red and yellow pixels). These fields were due to be irrigated the following day.”
If you'd like to know more, head to Earth Observatory where you can learn about how this new agricultural practice may limit the environmental impact of farming. For example, rather than “treat a field of crops as one homogeneous unit” and consequently “applying fertilizer evenly across the whole field,” farmers using remote sensors, GIS and GPS tools can selectively target areas with just the right amount of fertilizers and at the right time. The same goes for water, seeds, pesticides and herbicides.
So in other words, far from the genteel picture of rural life — “a hot summer afternoon in the country, peace, forgotten values, simple pleasures” — farms are no longer populated by country bumpkins but rather 21st century hyper-technophiles.
This is the Island of Hawai'i: magmatic, flora-encrusted, and fringed along the edges with the Suprematist geometries of sugar cane plantations, pineapple farms and human settlements. Against a blackened Pacific Ocean, it is, for lack of a better word, sublime.
This is a patch of the Karakoram mountain range claimed by India but currently occupied by China. It lies in the contested region of Kashmir.
Except, of course, that it isn't located where it's supposed to be, but rather deep in central China besides a military installation near the remote village of Huangyangtan.
A 450x350-kilometer area of rugged terrain — whole peaks, ridges, valleys, an entire hydrology — is scaled down to a 700x200-meter sandbox. There are two obvious questions that must be asked immediately: 1) How was it made, or rather, what is it made of? Since it would be more than a bit ironic to find that a part of the Himalayas, maybe even the actual source of its simulation, was dynamited, then transported for thousands of miles to the Gobi Desert, grounded up, mixed with cement, and finally painted as it were a Qing vase. Or maybe it's more likely that China, with its limited supply of so many natural resources, had to import the aggregate material from Africa and Australia.
And 2) what is it for? Pruned's resident Busby Berkeley fanatic thinks it's the stage setting for another lavish production of the Mahabharata. Vishnu made in China. Because apparently, filming in Bollywood is a lot more expensive now.
The Register, meanwhile, posits this “sensible explanation”: rather than a bewildering landscape expression of globalization and mass entertainment, instead “it's a training aid for pilots - possibly helicopter jockeys - designed to familiarise them with the landscape should military action ever be required.” But then one wonders why there are no Spratly Islands, arguably a more strategically important target than Kashmir, to be found.
Not content with any of these speculations, we telepathically interviewed BLDGBLOG, who guessed it to be yet another example of topographical terrorism gone voodoo: “simulacra as a threat to national security.” Or simply a form of tactical intimidation. Instead of being blasted with nighttime sonic booms and recursive Spice Girls medleys until they capitulate, your enemy watches televisually on Google Earth as you rape and pillage their own backyards, growing ever more paranoid of the real invasion, the one precisely choreographed and endlessly practiced, to the point of civil unrest.
This is landscape architecture as tactical psychological warfare.
It could also be the modern equivalent of spoils-taking. Forget about the gold, the obelisks, the giant menorahs, the virgins (supposedly), or chunks of churches, mosques and palaces. The victors will slice off entire topographies and then cart it all the way back to the homeland.
For instance, once the current incursion provisionally ends, the Israeli army shaves off a whole mountain (or two) from the Anti-Lebanon and transplant it to the Negev Desert. Similarly, after yet another Greco-Turkish skirmish on the high seas has concluded, a Greek island gets yanked off from the Aegean and placed atop a pedestal in front of Atatürk's mausoleum. Perhaps just before the U.S. forces leave Iraq, a segment of the Tigris and the Euphrates will be flown off on a C-130 halfway around the world to Nebraska, where landscape architects, in the spirit of Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl, have prepared grand parades and mass celebrations as lavish as any organized by Kim Jong-il for the arrival and installation.
In any case, whatever the conflict and the geography, all terrestrial spoils will be assembled in plain sight for all Google Map and Google Earth tourists alike.
Finally, above, a photo of the Karakoram mountains and its analogue, their lakes in perfect rhymming scheme.
The self-convecting bowels of the earth, sunless but shimmering, as explored by Julian P. Lowman and colleagues. Whirlpools of pavilions, billowing magmatic-fountains, uncertain hedges, lethal groves. Come, let us take you there.
These “structures” can be found off the coast of the island of Yonaguni near Okinawa, Japan, and according to the Morien Institute, they “show quite clearly that, during the last Ice Age, civilisation flourished on what were then the coastal areas of the many parts of the world which, despite glaciations further north, still enjoyed a very pleasant, temperate climate. These ancient settlements are proving to have been much more advanced urban cities than current models of prehistory are prepared to acknowledge, but their existence is just as real as the fact that they were obviously flooded during the abrupt end of the last Ice Age, at the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary.”
Or they aren't man-made structures at all, and that in actuality, according to geologist Robert M. Schoch, geomorphological processes such as “natural wave and tidal actionæ” have eroded and removed ”the sandstones in such a way that very regular step-like and terrace-like structure remain.”
Or maybe, as a middle ground between the two theories, the Yonaguni Monuments were at first natural formations but later terraformed, i.e., manipulated and modified by human hands, into ceremonial platforms.
And transoceanic ports?
Pleistocene astronomical observatories?
Or maybe it was the site of a quarry from which “blocks were cut, utilizing natural bedding, joint, and fracture planes of the rock, and thence removed for the purpose of constructing other structures which are long since gone.”
Suffice to say they require further investigation.
So in the meantime, all these photos suggest unambiguously that when the Egyptian pyramids are dropped into the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, they will remain as enigmatic as they were in the open desert, if not more so. That any other large structures, from the Eiffel Tower to Notre Dame Cathedral to Angkor Wat, are probably better explored underwater, devoid of a totality of experience.
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.
