Geography Blog

Year: 2012

  • Local mining for sand used in fracking

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    averslui

    The process of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, uses pressurized fluids to fracture shale formations in order to extract natural gas or petroleum. Fossil fuel pumping using this technique has greatly accelerated since the early 2000’s. It allows fossil fuels that were formerly too difficult and expensive to extract to be mined, and has been an…

  • Mapping Racist Tweets

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    mbjellan

    RacisThe geography über nerds at the Floating Sheep collective have made another fascinating map. They mapped geo-tagged racist tweets that emerged after President Barack Obama’s re-election and computed location quotients based on the total state volume of tweets. One weakness of the map is that the sample size was small since they only sampled 0.05% of…

  • Geology and political affiliation

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    averslui

    An interesting blog post titled “How presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline” is making waves. The Black Belt region of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia corresponds to a band of Cretaceous chalk deposited by a shallow sea over 65 million years ago. This chalk is the parent material for the region’s…

  • Lencho Bati to speak at Minnesota State

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    averslui

    Those of you who may have missed Prof. Bati’s excellent talk on Ethiopia last week at Gustavus have another chance! Geography Professor Lencho Bati will present “Africa After the Cold War” on Friday, November 9, at 3pm as part of Minnesota State University‘s Geography Department Colloquium (15 Armstrong Hall).

  • Mapping study abroad patterns

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    averslui

    Here’s an interesting website by UNESCO that maps the flows of students studying abroad. Where do most U.S. students go when they study abroad? Do the same countries send their students to study in the U.S.? What about students from Boliva–where do they go to study abroad? Who knew that a large percentage of Uganda’s…

  • Geography Department sponsors talk on Ethiopia, human rights, and US policy

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    averslui

    The Geography Department at Gustavus is pleased to announce a talk by Visiting Professor and East Africa expert Lencho Bati. The talk, “Human Rights in Ethiopia and U.S. Foreign Policy,” will take place at 3:00 pm on Friday, November 2, in Nobel Hall 105. The talk is free and open to the public.

  • A Connected World as Seen Through the Eyes of Facebook

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    mbjellan

    The link below connects to an interactive map that allows the user to visualize which countries are most socially connected to other countries through Facebook friends. Try to predict which countries are most socially connected and then click on a country and find out if you are right. The importance of language, historical connections,  migration…

  • Beware the Ides of October

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    rbergstr

    Transition months can be deadly! For those who suffer from weathermania, the months of October and March are of particular interest as it is during this period that we typically transition from autumn to winter and winter to spring respectively.  One such transition period, October of 1991, saw trick-or-treaters in Minnesota slog through 8 inches…

  • Geography student travels to Alaska

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    averslui

    Gustavus student Cristian Raether is in Alaska for several weeks as part of his training to become a nurse. He spent several weeks at a hospital in Fairbanks and is now at “the top of the world” in Barrow. You can follow his adventures at his blog “Alaska, My Trip to the Last Frontier”: http://cristianalaska.blogspot.com/.

  • Geography celebrates 60 years at Gustavus

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    averslui

    The Geography Department at Gustavus celebrated its 60th anniversary with a reunion last Saturday. The celebration commemorated the retirement of Dr. Bob Douglas and the 50th year of Gustavus teaching by Dr. Bob Moline. Congratulations all around! Thank you to everyone who attended–despite a rainy homecoming Saturday. It was a delight to see you and…