Tag Archives: Mapping

Birds use massive magnetic maps to migrate – and some could cover the whole world

Richard Holland is Professor in Animal Behaviour, School of Natural Sciences, Bangor University. His research group focuses on the cognitive processes and sensory mechanisms by which animals navigate and migrate. “While my principle focus is at the level of the whole organism I also incorporate aspects of neurobiology, molecular biology, and physics to identify the environmental cues, sensory pathways and mechanisms used by animals to decide how, when and where to move.”

Dmitry Kishkinev is a Lecturer in Animal Behaviour and Behavioural Neuroscience, Keele University. His project ‘Sensory systems for short and long-distance navigation in birds ‘ addressed the questions of how migratory songbirds can use magnetic and olfactory senses for finding their geographic position relative to destinations, whether the use of these senses depends on geographic scale (short vs long distances) and where magnetosensensory cells (aka magnetoreceptors) could be located in the animal’s body.

Marie Tharp pioneered mapping the bottom of the ocean 6 decades ago – scientists are still learning about Earth’s last frontier

Suzanne OConnell is Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Wesleyan University. She studies Antarctic paleoclimate using marine sediment cores from IODP (International Ocean Discovery Program). This is to understand how Antarctica has changed in the past, information that will help researchers to understand and model future climate change. Her current research focuses on Antarctic climate change using sediment cores from the Weddell Sea, Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Leg 113. She has authored or co-authored over 60 refereed publications and edited the JOIDES Journal as well as ODP Initial Reports and Scientific Results. In 2015, she co-edited and co-authored the book “Women in the Geoscience: Practical, Positive, Practices Toward Parity”

Michael E Davias – LiDAR: Seeing the Earth in a New Light

When photography captures the Earth’s topography, vegetation often obfuscates the fine details. Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) allows the solid surface to be viewed in a new light. I have applied LiDAR technology to research the “Carolina bays”, ovoid basins found by the tens of thousands in the USA.

The Thames (from London Bridge, Arizona to Sheerness, Canada)

Layla Curtis is an artist whose practice has a focus on place, landscape and mapping. Her multi-form work examines the attempts we make to chart the earth, how we locate ourselves, navigate space and represent terrain. She explores the ways in which we perceive, make use of and interact with the spaces we inhabit. Often she seeks to understand place by examining its connections with elsewhere.

Where the Dragons Lie

Shannon Rankin is an artist who uses the language of maps to explore the complexities and interconnections between the inner and outer worlds, between that which is known and that which remains beyond the field of knowledge, that mythical place on medieval maps where the dragons lie and cherubs blow the wind. The duality of our human capacity for imagination and reason, for creation and destruction, for being of nature and apart from it, is a rhumb line that courses through her work.

Mapworks

Chris Kenny’s three-dimensional collage-constructions have been described as ‘witty, severe, paradoxical things, appearing at once rational and also deeply surreal’. In his ‘Mapworks’, he uses the colours of his materials in an almost painterly way, and says that he replaces “the cartographer’s logic with an absurd imaginative system. The roads float and interact in unlikely combinations that allow one’s mind to ricochet back and forth between disparate locations and associations.”

Current Wars and Conflicts

Cartography, methods of visualizing information, history, current events, satire and humor are some of the subjects that captivate Dan Mills. He began to incorporate maps into his work in the early 1990s while exploring the quincentennial of what is euphemistically referred to as The First Encounter. Since then, he has made series about history and colonization in painting/collages on large roll-down school maps that explore imperialism by creating an atlas reconfiguring the world, about loss in history through erasure and overpainting maps, and that use maps as a space to visualize data about wars and conflicts.

Tactile Maps

Driven by her desire to “know the world,” Ingrid Calame has been tracing the marks on its surface, turning them into intricate paintings, drawings, prints, and murals, for nearly 20 years. As she explains: “the idea was that the whole surface of the world is a potential drawing. I can’t trace the whole world, so I’m tracing a fragment. I’m interested in how impossible it is for us to represent something as huge as the world.”