anthropocene – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: anthropocene

April 30, 2014 – 3:49 pm

mesosphere excavations

[Four recent atmospheric paintings of abstracted anthropogenic geomorphologies by Philip Govedare, whose work was recently featured on Butdoesitfloat. In order from top to bottom, the paintings are: “Melt”, “Excavation #5”, “Mesosphere”, and “Excavation #6”.]

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July 26, 2013 – 1:40 pm

elephant butte reservoir

[Elephant Butte Reservoir, New Mexico’s largest reservoir, which supplies water to “about 90,000 acres of farmland and nearly half the population of El Paso”; the GIF above (by mammoth) combines NASA Earth Observatory satellite imagery from 1994 and 2013 to show the depletion caused by repeated droughts since 2000. Now off to start tumblrs of […]

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June 1, 2013 – 6:30 am

feedback: designing the dredge cycle

[Beach replenishment on Rockaway Beach, New York (well before Hurricane Sandy); image via USACE] Fellow Dredge Research Collaborator Brett Milligan and I have a co-authored article in the latest issue of Scenario Journal (formerly Landscape Urbanism Journal), 04: Rethinking Infrastructure. The article reflects on the after effects of Hurricane Sandy, the history and future of […]

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November 28, 2012 – 6:00 am

making the geologic now

[Jinanqiao Dam under construction on the Jinsha River. New “mega-dams” such as Jinanqiao in high seismic risk zones — territories prone to earthquakes, in other words — are at the center of a highly consequential scientific debate about whether the dams are making disasters like catastrophic 2008 Wenchuan earthquake more likely and frequent. Fascinatingly, the argument is […]

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October 25, 2012 – 10:39 pm

event horizon

[A seaplane taxis in Jamaica Bay, 1918, with Barren Island in the background; source.] I recently contributed a short piece to the excellent Fulcrum. The piece begins with a very short version of the bizarre history of Dead Horse Bay and Barren Island — about which I had to leave out eccentric anecdote after eccentric […]

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August 6, 2012 – 6:00 am

dredgefest nyc

[Beach nourishment in Monmouth, New Jersey. Photo: USACE.] A few months ago, I posted the live interview that the Dredge Research Collaborative (Stephen, Brett Milligan, Tim Maly, and myself) did with Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley at Studio-X NYC. Both at that event and in the short post I did, we promised that we’d be […]

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July 3, 2012 – 9:12 pm

designing novel ecosystems

[Wildfires in the southern Rockies from space, June 23; via NASA Earth Observatory.] A recent post on the current wildfires in the southern Rockies at the New York Times‘ Green blog reminded me that I had intended to excerpt an earlier editorial, also at the New York Times, which defended the notion of the Anthropocene […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field | Also tagged , , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
May 24, 2012 – 7:00 pm

withdrawal and rise

[Detail from a map of groundwater wells in Jackson County, Texas, drawn by the U.S.G.S. in cooperation with the Texas Water Development Board and Jackson County; satellite studies of groundwater levels — which use small changes in the Earth’s gravitational field to detect fluctuations in groundwater reserves — have indicated extreme depletion in Texas as […]

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May 24, 2012 – 6:00 am

shiptracks

[Ship tracks — “narrow clouds… form[ed] when water vapor condenses around tiny particles of pollution that ships either emit directly as exhaust or that form as a result of gases within the exhaust” — in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, captured photographically by a NASA satellite; the atmospheric trace of the seaborne transfer […]

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April 3, 2012 – 6:00 am

empire negative

[The negative image of the Empire State Building, carved out of oolithic Indiana limestone, and aged into an enormous swimming pool; via Atlas Obscura, which writes: [Indiana limestone] was in such demand that a massive industry cropped up around it, and hundreds of thousands of tons of mammoth stone slabs were carved out of the […]

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