Very Spatial Games

Map games are a very useful way of teaching someone the basics about an area. I played some various games from the posted links and found some of them pretty good at teaching me where things are located on maps and got me use to the spatial aspect of maps.

The first one I played was called find it russia. It was where you just has a map of russia and the surrounding countries and you had to select the correct one when the name came yp. This is a very good tool if you needed to memorize where each contry is.

Another game that I played was GeoNet. This was a little more of a challenging one that gave spatial references to things and you were given choices to what it was. This is a great was to not just focus on one thing but to look around and get the spatial references around a place.

The last game that I played was from the national geographic website. This was a game that was simply just educational and interesting rather than playing along. This one was called see GIS in action. It showed lots of endangered animals and gave lots of different maps to show the facts and statistics about that animal so people can learn more about how to save them.

Mapping the Enviroment

This is the section on the minerals of nevada.





For this blog I used the USGS site. I found that the united states geological survey had the most information regarding the scientific aspect of the landscape. You can click on any state on a map and are given almost all of the information you can possibly think of. They have basic geologic maps of minerals, water, agriculture and almost anything else. They also have a section deovted entirely to earthquake analysis and gives a real time map of the recent earth quakes in the area of your choice. They offer many different kinds of real time maps as well to help inform the public of what is constantly going on around them. Overall this was a very useful site and I think I will be using it allot in the near future for research of the nited States Landscape.





This is just one of many different water displacement maps.

Mapping History

Maps have been used to halp people understand certain things about a given area. Some are made to help people understand distances and hazards. I found some sites and old maps that people are using to try and re-map all of charles lindberg's flight routes while he was preparing to cross the atlantic ocean non stop. These maps show in great detail the exact way points he flew and what he flew over during his training. Using GIS they can reconstruct his whole flight path and try and judge how he altered his flight due to the terrain and the weather of the area he way flying over at the time.

Using GIS to recreate this it can help people better understand how he got ready for this flight. Lindberg tried to fly the exact same distance over land non stop to simulate the trip over the atlantic. The only big difference was the altitude change because when he flew over the atlantic he only flew about 1000 ft abou the water and in order to cross over the rockies he at least had to climb to 3000ft just to cross one of the low points. With GIS we can create these models to very acurate simulations.

Mapping the News

There are many different ways the news uses maps to show data to the public. First off the easiest to see is the weather maps that are used by the news to show the public the projected weather patterns. Many different maps are used for this, some are satelite images and others just projected maps with the data sets on top of them.

The projected weather forecasts are a simple way to give basic weather data to the public.

Another way they use maps are to show various political information so people can get a good hanlde on who supports each canidate in each area. They are mostly maps of the division of democrats and republicans views on issues but the can give a good idea of what is going on in the country.

A simple representation of the political divide map.

One last way the news projects thier information on maps is to show people the location of current events. These are just reference maps that give people vital information to where a crime has happened or a natural disaster. They are mostly jusy locational maps rather than projecting lots of information to the audience.

This map gives the location and area of affect of an earthquake in Washington state.

Virtual Nevada/ Las Vegas

The las vegas street view helps familiarize yourself with actual pictures of the area on google earth.


After using both google earth and Live, I noticed some small difference between the two. First in google Earth it was very easy to use and I was able to click on any street I wanted in Las Vegas and get a pretty clear picture of the area. This is a very useful thing because if I was trying to find a map of downtown las vegas some pictures of the land marks would be very helpful. If you just get a map then you are going by what it says and not what it show, if you use google earth you can get close up pictures of what the streets actually look like so when your down there everything will look familiar because you have seen it all before. The Live search was also a good tool but it did not have as good of a user interface as the google earth did.

My Top 5

5. Whistler Canada

4. Aspen Co.

3. The Matterhorn Switzerland

2. Anochorage Alaska

1. Himalayas

Whistler Canada is a place that I have known about for quite sometime now. I have always wanted to go to there. It is one of the worlds best places to sky with some of the best peaks to go off of. They get loads of snow every year and are open for many months out of the year, and in the center bowl or valley there is the small town of Whistler that is a nice ski town secluded deep in the mountains.

Aspen is #4 because it is a place I have actually been to very many time. I grew up in Colorado on the eastern slope and use to visit aspen all the time. It was a very small ski town that had mostly tourists in it but today has grown to be a pretty big town. It also is surrounded by ski resorts but the mountains arent as high as th Canadaian or Sierra mountains. Overall a very beautiful place.

#3 would have to be the matterhorn in Switzerland. I have never been there but I would love to hang glide off the top of it. It is a small mountain peak that is completly maed of rock and is located in the mifddle of the swiss alps were most of my family is from.

#2 would have to be Anochorage Alaska. I have always wanted to visit alaska. I they have very low annual tempratures and get allot of snow every year even though they are practilly at sea level. They also have the most number of planes and pilots than any other state in the U.S. because anything outside of the big city in alsak has to be flown in.

#1. would have to be the tallest mountains in the rodl, the Himalayas. I love the cold and mountains. So the largest one in the world are the number one place I want to visit. There are not very many towns in this area due to the extremly rough terrain but the peoplr you do find are very tough and rugged for the extreme conditions they live in.

Mapping Nevada

The Nevada airspace restrictions, mainly military.

The General Seismic activity of Nevada from USGS.

The satelite photo of Nevada shows the great basin and the relative patterns of the landscape.

I would like to focus on the remote sensing maps of Nevada. I have found lots of sites that give good aerial and satelite photos of Nevada. One of the best and easiest to use was http://geology.com/states/nevada.shtml. This one had good examples of several different types of maps that were mainly satelite images. They had maps of the different kind of rock found in the area to elevation data. There were also some images of scanned radar maps. These were maps of underground bedrock of Nevada and showed the relative patterens of the area and what possible elements might be there. Also it gave a good incite into why all of the mines in Nevada are where they are. They are mainly focused around small discoveries and then centered over big deposits of whatever they are mining. Most of them are open-pit mines in valleys and on the side of mountains.

Another good site I found was http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/states/nevada/seismicity.php. This one had seismic activity maps of Nevada. It showed the patterns of earthquakes and the frequency at which they happen along the western edge of the state. There are some that are scattered all along the mountain ranges in the center of the state but most follow the border along California, which makes since because just a few miles farther west you have the huge San Andreas fault line.

Lastly another great site wich I thought was interesting was http://dcnr.nv.gov/jan06.htm. This was a site about Nevada and the conservation of the natural recources within the state. I found a map of the airspace restrictions over Nevada and noticed almost half of the state is closed off for either military airspace and nature preserves. This was interesting because that means no one is allowed to fly over Nevada at no less thatn 10,000 ft. AGL. So there are still areas where there is very little amounts of aerial photographs being taken because of this restriction.

Maps, the Web, and virtual Cartography

Globbale Mapper

Today these new programs like Global Mapper, and Google Earth have changed the way we percieve the world. With a map program like Google Earth you can view the entire globe from many different views. There are street maps and different directional guides to satelite images taken from all over the globe. There are even small points of interest on the maps and when you click them them pop up and give you pictures and descriptions of that point. There is almost no reason now to get lost or miss any important object while out and about anywhere in the world. These are the two programs that I am familiar with and have experienced the easy to use programs to map the world. Another great way about the technology today is the ability to remote sense an area and find out loads of information without ever visiting the place. A good example of this would be the satelite images that people use to retrieve information for mining. With all of these helpful programs now the study of Geography and Geology will become very fast paced.