Geography Blog

Category: Geographic research and news

  • Geography Association Announces Awards

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    averslui

    One way for students to get a better understanding of the discipline of geography in America is to see who wins the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Honors each year. The recipients for 2012 have just been announced. Granted, there are many people who qualify for the awards and the selection process always involves some…

  • Escalating war in Congo

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    averslui

    Violence has been escalating in the eastern areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), in central Africa. Foreign Policy writes that Goma, “one of Congo’s biggest eastern cities fell to a powerful rebel force on Tuesday, Nov. 20, in a war that may redefine the region but has produced little political action…

  • Using GIS to study history

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    averslui

    This month’s Smithsonian magazine features Dr. Anne Kelly Knowles, a geographer at Middlebury College who uses GIS to study historical events. She is a winner of the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award. Knowles became interested in geography later in life while working as an editor with a University of Chicago geography professor:  “I was blown away.…

  • Geographer Don Mitchell receives Swedish Society medal

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    averslui

    Post adapted from the November 2012 AAG Newsletter. Don Mitchell, Maxwell Distinguished Professor of Geography at Syracuse University, recently received the prestigious Anders Retzius Medal in Gold from the Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography (SSAG). The award was presented to Mitchell by His Majesty Carl XVI Gustaf, King of Sweden on Vega Day, which…

  • Kuehnast Lecture Series on Climate

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    averslui

    The University of Minnesota held a “mini climate school” on November 9, 2012 as part of the 20th annual Kuehnast Lecture. The three informational talks on 1) climate change in Canada, 2) urban climates, and 3) severe thunderstorms and climate change are available for streaming. Past years’ talks may also be watched online.

  • 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…