[Fort Peck Lake (top), Spillway (middle) and Dam (above), in northeast Montana; built between 1933 and 1940, Fort Peck is the world's largest "hydraulically-filled" dam, which means that it was constructed by dredging suspended sediment from borrow pits and pumping it to discharge pipes at the dam site, where it settles onto the embankment. (This [...]
[The "project design flood" is the maximum flood that the Army Corps of Engineers has engineered the Mississippi River's flood control structures to accommodate; the image here (via America's Wetland and Loyola University) shows those flows in cubic feet per second. I've been slow to link (though, as promised, the flood blogging is going to pick [...]
[You may recall that our posting on floods began with an image quite like the two above. That first image was, like these two, a false-color satellite image of the open Morganza Spillway; but where the first image was taken in May, the two above were taken on May 5, 1973 and April 6, 1977 [...]
[Mound Crevasse; the explosive force of the 1927 levee break remains visible in the blast-like pattern of lakes and shredded terrain that is clearly visible in this current satellite image.] If you look closely at the Army Corps’ map of the 1927 Mississippi floods from a couple posts back, one of the major patterns that [...]
[Nerea Calvillo's "In the Air" -- "a visualization project which aims to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid´s air" -- Visualizar '08] A brief interruption to the flood-blogging (which will resume shortly, with more on 1927 and crevasses) to note that I’ll be speaking in Madrid at Visualizar ’11 “Understanding Infrastructures”. The [...]
[Map prepared by the US Coast and Geodetic Survey (the fore-runner of today's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) in 1927, after the Great Mississippi Flood of that year. The map shows "flooded areas and the field of operations". The great devastation produced by the 1927 flood -- it flooded an area approximately equal to the [...]
[Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Green River in Utah; the reservoir's primary dam is highlighted in red. In anticipation of record summer floods, the reservoir's waters are "being released as fast as [they] can flow”, making space in the reservoir to hold snowmelt. Downstream, rafters are finding that typical rafting trips of two-and-a-half hours are [...]
The next week or two will be dedicated to floods. This may be entirely obvious, but I think it is worth beginning by noting that floods are not good, and floods are not fun. We’re not talking about floods because we enjoy flooding. Floods are, however, a constant — as we are reminded by the [...]
[Photographs from Christoph Engel's series "Exterieur", which explores the sort of cryptoforested terrain vague which the urban field manual might excel in operating in.] Issue 14 of the Magazine On New Urbanisms, “Editing Urbanism”, is out. Brian Davis, Brett Milligan, and I co-wrote a piece in that issue, “Urban Field Manuals”, which argues that the [...]
[Hong Kong's West Kowloon Reclamation project, photographed in the mid-nineties while under construction; photographs via GAKEI.com.] ["Since land reclamation first began in 1841, [Victoria] harbor has shrunk to half its original size. Meanwhile, more than 17,000 acres of developed land have been added to the waterfront throughout the region — accounting for nearly 7 percent [...]
April 21, 2011 – 12:00 pm
[Colonnade Park, photographed by Brett Milligan.] Free Association Design reports from Seattle’s Colonnade Park, an “urban mountain bike skills park” constructed by volunteers from the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance: It hard not to be enamored by the successful and improvised gestalt of the whole thing, in both program and materials. Much of what it is [...]
[The strange spray-painted glyphs marking "our subterranean infrastructure"; image source.] Nicola Twilley walks with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, for Good Magazine‘s Los Angeles issue: “Armed only with a manila folder stuffed full of clippings, archive photos, and annotated printouts from Wikimapia, our first stop is the median strip on the 9500 block of [...]
March 31, 2011 – 12:00 pm
["Cushing has fewer than 10,000 residents, but you can drive around for hours and still not see all the huge tanks there."] Tuesday morning, I caught a portion of an NPR piece on the “pipelines and trucking corridors” that bring Canadian oil from the Alberta oil sands into the United States — and then promptly [...]
[The Dixon Land Imprinter, described by the Out of Water project.] This is probably a bit late to be truly timely, but there are a pair of interdisciplinary-but-architecturally-oriented conferences this weekend (1 and 2 April) hosted by the Universities of Pennsylvania and Toronto, which may be of interest to mammoth readers who are in or [...]
March 25, 2011 – 12:18 pm
[The photography of Toshio Shibata has made its way around before, but, as but does it float reminds us, it is well worth second and third gazes.]
[Top: land-use patterns in Johannesburg, shaped by the trace of mines, mine dumps, and tailings ponds, via Bing maps; bottom: a drive-in movie theater, now closed, on top of the Top Star gold mine dump in Johannesburg, photographed by Dorothy Tang] Last year, because reading thesis blogs is one of Stephen and I’s favorite (and [...]
February 1, 2011 – 6:00 am
[SPL's open-pit salt mine in the Tarapacá salt flats, via Google Maps.] In December, after we began our winter hiatus, Urban Omnibus posted ran a fantastic post by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, “Geologic City”, which briefly summarized several of the much longer “Geologic City Field Reports” which have run on the Friends of the [...]
October 27, 2010 – 8:48 pm
I’ve mentioned before my fondness for the blog Pathological Geomorphology, but this month’s theme is particularly fantastic: the interface of human landscapes and geomorphology. In Green River, Utah (above), for instance, an extinct oxbow determines contemporary land-use patterns; other examples so far include farmed alluvial fans in Asian deserts, Pennsylvania farmland interspersed between anticlines, and [...]
October 22, 2010 – 6:31 am
[Barchan dunes -- the recent, light sandy formations -- layered atop older longitudinal dunes -- darker, subtler lines roughly traced southwest to northeast -- and braced against the pure Suprematist geometry of pivot irrigation along Idaho's Snake River; via NASA Earth Observatory.]
October 8, 2010 – 3:23 pm
[An abandoned portion of the "Golden Gate Estates" -- a massive land scam promoted by a Florida developer in the 1960's -- whose miles of canals and roads would have been the infrastructure for the largest subdivision in the United States if the land hadn't been utterly unsuitable to development. The problem, of course, is that [...]
