anthropocene – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: anthropocene

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 [...]

By rholmes | Posted in dredge, events, landscape, publications | Also tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off | Permalink
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 [...]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape | Also tagged , , , , | Comments Off | Permalink
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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