Today’s blog comes from Charles Pauka, the Editor of Spatial Source – Australiasia’s online source for surveying, mapping and geoinformation.
Over to you Charles!
Despite the great advances mankind has made in technology, from walking on the moon to building ever-bigger ships, aeroplanes and earthmoving or mining equipment, nature has a way of reminding us just how small and insignificant we are in the overall scheme of things.
From devastating floods and earthquakes to volcanos that disrupt the travel plans of tens of thousands of people, we are constantly at the mercy of the elements.
While disasters make the news, there are other ways nature likes to play tricks on us, too. For example, if you rely on your GPS to get you around, consider this: the next solar maxim (expected in 2013) could play havoc with many sensitive systems relying on GPS, such as mission-critical aviation, defence and space exploration guidance and control networks.
But there is good news on the horizon, too. Although we cannot stop major floods, the good folk at the CSIRO have developed a model to predict the consequences of dam breaks. The modelling combines static landscape data from a GIS, and combines it with dynamic data generated from fluid analysis to show how infrastructure will be affected – which is really great if you live downstream from a major dam.
And lastly, more and more people are discovering that talking ‘bout GIS can be fun. The last GEOrabble in Sydney in the middle of June brought together close to a hundred passionate GISers and other geotypes and was similarly successful to the first one held in March – you can read about it here.
Until next time,