The Earthporn Map

Unfortunate name, but there is nothing 'porn' about it - just a map of the r/EarthPorn is a subreddit: The Earthporn Map. Could be a useful tool to plan your next vacation!

How Fast Is the Earth Spinning Where You Are?

Cool little web animation - use it to better understand the Coriolis Effect: How Fast Is the Earth Spinning Where You Are?

Tariffs: Explained

 

The VOSviewer

From the website: VOSviewer is a software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks. These networks may for instance include journals, researchers, or individual publications, and they can be constructed based on citation, bibliographic coupling, co-citation, or co-authorship relations. VOSviewer also offers text mining functionality that can be used to construct and visualize co-occurrence networks of important terms extracted from a body of scientific literature.

A Geology Joke!

 

Big Data

What is Big Data? Here is a nice & practical 'definition': Big data is a dataset that is too big to be processed using MS Excel. The term 'big' can mean a variety of things: size/volume (of course),  but also update frequency (real-time maybe), containing a variety of data types, and dimensionality.

Climate Havens vs. Heavy Rain & Flooding

Sure, there are no 'true' climate havens, but to me northern Vermont & other remain places remain 'practical' climate havens despite their exposure to risk from heavy rains & associated flooding (e.g. Asheville, NC).

WMO 2024 State of the Global Climate Report

Here is the 2024 State of the Global Climate Report from the World Meteorological Organization.:

• State of the Global Climate 2024
• State of the Climate 2024 (Esri Story Map)
• Extreme Events 2024 (Web Map)

1970-2024

 

Deep Research Tools from OpenAI & Google

These tools can basically synthesize the information from 100s of websites into nice and tidy cited literature reviews. And that's great for many basic science & technology topics where there is enough information available out there on reputable online sources.

But the notion that this can replace a classic scientific literture review of meta-analysis is incorrect. First, these AIs do not have access to the actual scientific literature (which tends to sit behind paywalls). Second, there is a difference between a summary, a review, and a synthesis. Sure, a competent & trained amateur such as an AI can summarize, but reviewing & synthesizing requires a familiarity with the subject matter that can only be gained by years and years of deep immersion (aka. 10,000 hours...).

Air Tours & UpToWhere

Here are two cool apps for exploring the world:

1. Air Tours allows you to explore cities by combining Google Maps 3D, Street View and more. For example: here's Boston.
2. UpToWhere is a basic viewshed tool, but creates a great 3D visualization.

Census Dots

Finally updated for the 2020 Census: Census Dots (1 person = 1 dot)

The U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index

The U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index

From the website: Pulling in 184 sets of data to rank more than 70,000 U.S. Census tracts, the U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index helps you see which communities face the greatest challenges from the impacts of a changing climate. This tool shows what is driving the challenges, so policymakers and communities themselves can take action to build climate resilience where it is needed most.

The MoAT: The Museum of All Things

This is just cool: The MoAT: The Museum of All Things

From the website: The Museum of All Things (or "The MoAT") is a nearly-infinite virtual museum that you can visit for free on your computer! You can find exhibits on millions of topics, from Arts in the Philippines to Zinc deficiency! The breadth of the museum is made possible by downloading text and images from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Every exhibit in the museum corresponds to a Wikipedia article. The walls of the exhibit are covered in images and text from the article, and hallways lead out to other exhibits based on the article's links.

One caveat: you need to actually download the museum software onto your computer:

• https://mayeclair.itch.io/museum-of-all-things (Windows, Mac, OpenXR, etc.)
• https://github.com/m4ym4y/museum-of-all-things (for the nerds)

Rail Transit Access vs Population Density

Rail Transit & Population Density compares and ranks 250 cities around the world - the side-by-side map and table comparison is great!

America's Drunkest and Driest Counties

Fun: America's Drunkest and Driest Counties - explain these spatial patterns!

The Milky Way Map

This is apparently the largest map of the Milky Way: https://archive.eso.org/scienceportal/home. Very cool, but I'm not sure what anyone can do with this...here's a little more beta from Joe Kerski.

NetCDF in ArcGIS Pro

I always wanted to try this: Explore a NetCDF file

3D Print Your World

Great compilation of tools by Maps Mania: 3D Print Your World

• Topography Explorer
• DEM Net Elevation API
• Tiel Exporter

NAIP 2023 Imagery

I always forget about the NAIP Imagery - a great source for free satellite data at pretty decent resolution (30 cm / 60 cm).

More here:

• NAIP Annual Coverage
• USA NAIP Imagery: Natural Color

Esri Story Maps: Categorized Map Tours

This could be a useful template for Esri Story Maps: categorized map tours. Here's an example: https://arcg.is/0b8vi42. The process sounds a little 'campy' & seems to require to have/create a feature service first?

Here's how to create a map tour from actual ArcGIS Data: Create a data-driven map tour

Godview AI

Godview is basically an AI with a map interface that allows you to perform 'classic' AI stuff, bur with geographic output & also to discover things based on clicking around.

How To Digitize Fast!

Brilliant video tutorial on how to digitize complex geographic features (e.g. glacier margins) fast & precise:

Nuclear Energy, SRMs, Cost, and Fossil Fuels

 

The Street View Animator

The Street View Animator looks like great fun - more about it over @ Maps Mania.

My only concern is 'permanence' - these types of apps have a tendency to disappear after a while & then all your work disappears as well. This makes it a little risky to committ to it as a teaching tool.

Thomas Cole & The Oxbow

Source: https://www.facebook.com/lostnewengland

Greenhouse Effect Infographic

 
Source: Sabine Hossenfelder / Twitter

GLOBAL GLACIER CASUALTY LIST

The GLOBAL GLACIER CASUALTY LIST is nicely-done Esri Story Map - good luck keeping it updated!

LUDIA

Combine UDL & AI & you get LUDIA = Your AI-powered UDL partner.

Poe

Of couse this would happen: there are so many LLMs out there that one can use & now we need some kind aggregator & here is one of them: https://poe.com/about

Mapping YouTube Videos with AI

Good stuff here on Maps Mania: Automatically Mapping YouTube Videos

• Using allStara
• Using deepseek

Backcountry Ski Routes in the Presidential Range of New Hampshire

Well-done in CalTopo: https://caltopo.com/m/4U821FC

This would be great as a Story Map with linked / embedded pics & videos. More beta in his video:

Padlet!

Ah yes...we all used Padlet during COVID, but many of us (certainly me) have stopped using Padlet now that we are F2F again. But Padlet still works great, for example:

• Video Discussion Board where the students post one relevant video for a topic, for example ozone & global warming.
• Or, do the same with figures.
• There is also a Video Recorder where they could record a brief video of themselves talking into the camera.

Unfortunately, the free version of Padlet is limited to just 3 'padlets'...not sure how you could in-practice use that for daily teaching.

The Teacher’s Guide to Tech (2025)

The Teacher’s Guide to Tech (2025) is now available!

GeoSpy

GeoSpy can geoference photographs without any spatial information & apparently it works quite well - more @ https://flowingdata.com/2025/01/23/geolocating-photos-automatically/

That's pretty cool & also scary...no hiding anymore from the AI...

Teens & Social Media

Teens, Social Media and Technology 2024 by the Pew Research Center leads with this chart. Not sure what to make of it, but 1) YouTube rules, 2) TikTok & Instagram & Snapchat are important, 3) Twitter is irrelevant, and 4) Facebook is holding steady after dropping like a rock.

An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2024 Election

An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2024 Election by the NYT shows the 2024 election results down to the precint level & the data are available as well!

The Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas

The Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas is awesome - have a look! You can display measurements, reanalysis, and model data at all kinds of geographies & time scales. And: download the data in a bunch of formats.

It is just too much...nobody will use it. Expert scientists will access the data directly and the general public will scared off by the complexity. This is really designed for the rare 'regular' person who is interested & competent enough to figure-out the tool.

Suggestion: Make a simplified version or walk-through video.

Tourism & AI

Cool combination of tourism & AI: Google Talking Tours. Here Google combines Street View images & panoramas with an AI-generated narrative. Currently this only covers some 55 major sites, but you can easily envison this for literally anywhere.

SAR 'Images' in ArcGIS Pro

Good stuff here in-case you need to process SAR imagery in ArcGIS Pro: Getting to Know the SAR Analysis Toolset.