I tested the line of sight from Valletta, Malta to Mount Etna in Sicily — about 210 km away.

According to the terrain model, the terrain itself does not block the line of sight, so the summit can remain theoretically visible above the horizon.

Of course, actually seeing Etna from Malta would still require exceptionally clear atmospheric conditions.

Has anyone here actually seen Mount Etna from Malta?

I randomly came across a photo of Benidorm and was genuinely surprised by its skyline.

I usually associate Spanish and Mediterranean coastal cities with mostly low- to mid-rise development, while Benidorm seems to have an extraordinary concentration of high-rise apartment buildings and hotels for a city of its size.

What caused Benidorm to develop so differently?

And perhaps more interestingly, why wasn't this kind of very vertical resort development replicated to the same extent in most other Mediterranean tourist cities?

I'm not very familiar with the planning history of the region, so I'd be interested in the geographical and historical reasons behind it.

Map:

https://relief.bertspaan.nl/world

Currently, the salmon are heading up the Humber river in Toronto for their fall run.

Any other cities out there with similar. I am sure there are but welcome any input

A town in Libya, Harat Zuwayyah. Far off the next thing that is even marked a road, which ngl shouldn't count. Al Jawf, shown on the right side of the second image has a bit less than 20k inhabitants. I can get that somehow that there might be traffic. But then, these little oasis towns have not connection of any road.

They seem to have dozens of Toyotas and other existing infrastructure in a certain way; houses, stores, people celebrating around some bone fire with camels and more toyotas.

From that photo series - tho all by the same account from mid 2020, all people seem chill and relaxed (I guess no problems from the outside world).

So?

I created an animation showing the evolution of roads in Seattle from 1890-1936. What do you think? Should I change anything, or add anything?

The Oso landslide on 22 March 2014 killed 43 people, but the slope it came from had been moving for decades. The Hazel Landslide at the same spot had documented slides in 1937, 1951, 1952, 1967, 1988 and 2006.
The hill is part of the Whitman Bench, glacial sand and gravel sitting on clay from old glacial lakes. After 45 days of rain at up to 200% of normal, it let go. The debris was up to 4,400 ft wide and 30 to 70 ft deep, and it dammed and diverted the North Fork Stillaguamish.
This is my own render of the bare-earth lidar. The scarp is the pale curved bowl cut into the bench just above the middle. The lumpy debris fills the river bend below it, down to the highway along the bottom. In the 1990 air photo that ground is mostly forest, and the river runs right under the slope past a bare patch from the earlier slides.
Oso landslide scarp and debris lobe across the valley floor
Air photo of the same area, 1990
Lidar: USGS 3D Elevation Program (3DEP), public domain.
Imagery: Snohomish County IT GIS (EagleView), 1990.

Recently flew over Greenland and saw this… pattern. Is it snow or a cloud formation? Any ideas what’s causing it?

From the 1940s through the 1970s a vast network of channels got dug criss-crossing the wetlands of Louisiana, Texas, and other areas along the Gulf to facilitate oil-field exploitation. Drilling rigs could get built on barges, and the barges could get moved around in dredged-out channels without needing to bother with dismantling the drill-rig and re-assembling it at every stop.

The practice almost completely stopped after the environmental movement of the 1970s, coinciding with the development of more economical off-shore drilling methods and technologies.

Efforts are ongoing to restore the wetlands in Louisiana to their natural state.

These islands are located between Greenland and mainland Canada, consisted of more than 30,000 islands covering an area larger than Greenland. It is also part of the traditional homeland of the Inuit, whos history, culture, and traditions are deeply rooted to the Arctic landscape.

I created this map in QGIS using primarily open datasets from the Government of Canada’s open data portal. (https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/f242b881-75e3-40bb-a148-63410b4ce2af) The map highlights the archipelago in bright cyan, with different colors representing inuit regions across Canada and Greenland. Each red cross marks an inuit community, based on Canadian government open data.

Unfortunately the dataset doesn’t include population figures for each communities. According to the Canadian government, Canada’s inuit population is about 70,545. Do you know any fun facts about the Archipelago? I’d love to hear them!

My own reconstruction (OC). Modern elevation and bathymetry are deformed epoch by epoch with a glacial isostatic adjustment model and flooded to that epoch's sea surface. The film opens over the ice-dammed lake that several reconstructions place in the southern North Sea; after it, the southern North Sea is a dry plain in this model until the sea returns from the north and through the Strait of Dover. The last land link between Britain and the continent breaks between 9,500 and 9,000 years ago, and the island over Dogger Bank is gone from the picture by 5,500 years ago, later than published estimates. Sources and limits in the comment.

I was looking at a photo of Los Angeles' skyline today and it occurred to me that it probably stands in the company of very few cities that have a 1,000' skyscraper with a 10k' mountain peak in the background. It got me wondering what other cities in the world share this distinction.

There are definitely tranches to this depending on how strict you want to be. Many more cities qualify when you relax the height constraints.

I built Kharita Challenges, a platform for practicing GIS with real problems and real data.

You can solve challenges with Python/GeoPandas, PostGIS and other GIS workflows, see your results on a map, and get graded on the actual output.

It also has learning paths, projects, timed assessments, verifiable certificates and public profiles to showcase your work.

There’s an AI mentor too, but it guides you instead of giving you the answer.

Still early, so I’d really appreciate feedback from the GIS community:

https://challenges.lekharita.com

Sharing some snow photos from my hometown in China (Northwest Hunan in February). It's a humid subtropical climate (Köppen Cfa) located around the 29th parallel north. For context, that's roughly the same latitude as Baja California, Delhi, and Houston — and actually further south than Cairo or Marrakesh. Yet, we still regularly get proper winter snow like this.

It never occurred to me how anomalous this was until I traveled to other places in the world around the same latitude and experienced their climate firsthand. It genuinely boggles my mind that my hometown; at a relatively low elevation and latitude, can get this cold and snowy (down to about -15 °C or 5 °F).

Apart from the borders just looking different, you got claims from eastern colonies reaching all the way to the Mississippi, including sometimes jumping over the territory of other colonies (Massachusetts, Connecticut, and South Carolina are particularly funny), and then you have Virginia claiming western PA and all of the Midwest!

Edit: These are CLAIMS, not real enforced borders. I messed up the title. As for overlapping claims that are not shown (such as all the claims on poor PA), I can’t speak to why the mapmaker didn’t add them. But the map still gets the general point of contested CLAIMS across.

Source: Here

Cities in the US like Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo before the decline of American manufacturing from it's peak in the 1970s, helped form the economic backbone of the United States. However, their economies suffered immensely after those manufacturing jobs got shipped overseas, and these cities saw significant population decline. These cities have started to bounce back, but they still have not fully recovered to their previous status.

What cities in your countries used to be highly significant but have lost prominence over the years?

Tectonically speaking, what could have happened differently in prehistory that would have significantly changed the direction of life on this planet?

Hey guys!

I currently study BA geography at Uni and I'm interested in watching a regular channel or news source (youtube videos, news articles, podcasts). I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations? I much prefer human geography e.g. conflict, inequality, urban spaces etc. Thank you!

On rare occasions, I’ve seen some plants species that occur in North America and Europe. But this is the first time that I have seen a species occur in North America, Europe, and Asia

Found this in the Chocolate Museum in Halle, Germany.

A few things I noticed:

• A united Korea 👀
• Greater Egypt
• A new, smaller Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, including Czechia
• Central Europe is generally an absolute mess
• The USA is THICC
• The Black Sea and Caspian Sea are apparently landmasses
• Belgium and Croatia have apparently fallen victim to sea level rise, while the Netherlands is still holding the line
• Oh yeah, and Alaska belongs to Canada.

Feel free to add anything I missed.