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Scientists have created a new map of 85,000 volcanoes on Venus.
“This paper provides the most comprehensive map of all volcanic edifices on Venus ever compiled,” says Paul Byrne, an associate professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
“It provides researchers with an enormously valuable database for understanding volcanism on that planet—a key planetary process, but for Venus is something about which we know very little, even though it’s a world about the same size as our own.”
Byrne and Rebecca Hahn, a graduate student in earth and planetary sciences, used radar imagery from NASA’s Magellan mission to Venus to catalog volcanoes across the planet at a global scale. Their resulting database contains 85,000 volcanoes, about 99% of which are less than 3 miles (5 km) in diameter.
“Since NASA’s Magellan mission in the 1990s, we’ve had numerous major questions about Venus’ geology, including its volcanic characteristics,” Byrne says. “But with the recent discovery of active volcanism on Venus, understanding just where volcanoes are concentrated on the planet, how many there are, how big they are, etc., becomes all the more important—especially since we’ll have new data for Venus in the coming years.”
“We came up with this idea of putting together a global catalog because no one’s done it at this scale before,” says Hahn, first author of the paper in JGR Planets. “It was tedious, but I had experience using ArcGIS software, which is what I used to build the map. That tool wasn’t available when these data first became available back in the ’90s. People back then were manually hand-drawing circles around the volcanoes, when I can just do it on my computer.”
“This new database will enable scientists to think about where else to search for evidence of recent geological activity,” says Byrne, who is a faculty fellow of the university’s McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences. “We can do it either by trawling through the decades-old Magellan data (as the new Science paper did) or by analyzing future data and comparing it with Magellan data.”
The new study includes detailed analyses of where volcanoes are, where and how they’re clustered, and how their spatial distributions compare with geophysical properties of the planet such as crustal thickness.
Taken together, the work provides the most comprehensive understanding of Venus’ volcanic properties—and perhaps of any world’s volcanism so far.
That’s because, although we know a great deal about the volcanoes on Earth that are on land, there are still likely a great many yet to be discovered under the oceans. Lacking oceans of its own, Venus’ entire surface can be viewed with Magellan radar imagery.
Although there are volcanoes across almost the entire surface of Venus, the scientists found relatively fewer volcanoes in the 20-100 km diameter range, which may be a function of magma availability and eruption rate, they surmise.
Byrne and Hahn also wanted to take a closer look at smaller volcanoes on Venus, those less than 3 miles across that have been overlooked by previous volcano hunters.
“They’re the most common volcanic feature on the planet: they represent about 99% of my dataset,” Hahn says. “We looked at their distribution using different spatial statistics to figure out whether the volcanoes are clustered around other structures on Venus, or if they’re grouped in certain areas.”
The new volcanoes dataset is publicly available for other scientists to use.
“We’ve already heard from colleagues that they’ve downloaded the data and are starting to analyze it—which is exactly what we want,” Byrne says. “Other people will come up with questions we haven’t, about volcano shape, size, distribution, timing of activity in different parts of the planet, you name it. I’m excited to see what they can figure out with the new database!”
And if 85,000 volcanoes on Venus seems like a large number, Hahn says it’s actually conservative. She believes there are hundreds of thousands of additional geologic features that have some volcanic properties lurking on the surface of Venus. They’re just too small to get picked up.
“A volcano 1 kilometer in diameter in the Magellan data would be 7 pixels across, which is really hard to see,” Hahn says. “But with improved resolution, we could be able to resolve those structures.”
And it’s exactly that kind of data that future missions to Venus will acquire in the 2030s.
“NASA and ESA (the European Space Agency) are each sending a mission to Venus in the early 2030s to take high-resolution radar images of the surface,” Byrne says. “With those images, we’ll be able to search for those smaller volcanoes we predict are there.
“This is one of the most exciting discoveries we’ve made for Venus—with data that are decades old!” Byrne says. “But there are still a huge number of questions we have for Venus that we can’t answer, for which we have to get into the clouds and onto the surface.
“We’re just getting started,” he says.
Source: Washington University in St. Louis
The post Team maps 85,000 volcanoes on Venus appeared first on Futurity.
If you wanted to see a map of the world in the fourteenth century, you could hardly just pull up Google Earth. But you could, provided you lived somewhere in or near the British Isles, make a pilgrimage to Hereford Cathedral. There you would find the shrine of St. Thomas Cantilupe, the main attraction for the true believer, but also what we now know as the Hereford Mappa Mundi, a large-scale (64″ x 52″) depiction of the entire world — or at least entire world as conceived in the pious English mind of the Middle Ages, which turns out to be almost unrecognizable at first glance today.
Created around 1300, the Hereford Mappa Mundi “serves as a sort of visual encyclopedia of the period, with drawings inspired by Biblical times through the Middle Ages,” write Chris Griffiths and Thomas Buttery at BBC Travel.
“In addition to illustrating events marking the history of humankind and 420 cities and geographical features, the map shows plants, animals, birds and strange or unknown creatures, and people.” These include one “‘Blemmye’ — a war-like creature with no head, but with facial features in its chest,” two “Sciapods,” “men with one large foot,” and “four cave-dwelling Troglodites,” one of whom feasts on a snake.
Amid geography we would now consider severely limited as well as fairly mangled — Europe is labeled as Asia, and vice versa, to name only the most obvious mistake — the map also includes “supernatural scenes from classical Greek and Roman mythology, Biblical tales and a collection of popular legends and stories.” As such, this reflects less about the world itself than about humanity’s worldview in an era that drew fewer lines of demarcation between fact and legend. You can learn more about what it has to tell us in the Modern History TV video below, as well as in the video further down from Youtuber ShūBa̱ck, which asks, “Why are Medieval Maps so Weird?”
The intent of the Hereford Mappa Mundi, ShūBa̱ck says, is to show that “the Bible is right.” To that end, “east is on top, as that’s where they said Jesus would come from on the day of judgment. Jerusalem is, of course, at the center.” Other points of interest include the site of the crucifixion, the Tower of Babel, and the Garden of Eden — not to mention the locations of the Golden Fleece and Mount Olympus. You can examine all of these up close at the Hereford Cathedral’s site, which offers a detailed 3D scan of the map, viewable from every angle, embedded with explanations of all its major features: in other words, a kind of Google Medieval Earth.
via Aeon
Related content:
40,000 Early Modern Maps Are Now Freely Available Online (Courtesy of the British Library)
The Biggest Mistakes in Mapmaking History
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Above: a page of map symbols of topography from a world atlas. Below: Saul Steinberg’s “Country Noises.”
And in today’s mail: Brian Dillon’s latest, Affinities.
“The world keeps showing me these pictures.”
Filed under: convergences
Meet Carbon Maps, a new French startup that raised $4.3 million (€4 million) just a few weeks after its inception. The company is building a software-as-a-service platform for the food industry so that they can track the environmental impact of each of their products in their lineup. The platform can be used as a basis for eco ratings.
While there are quite a few carbon accounting startups — like Greenly, Sweep, Persefoni and Watershed — Carbon Maps isn’t an exact competitor as it doesn’t calculate a company’s carbon emissions as a whole. It doesn’t focus on carbon emissions exclusively either. Carbon Maps focuses on the food industry and evaluates the environmental impact of products — not companies.
Co-founded by Patrick Asdaghi, Jérémie Wainstain and Estelle Huynh, the company managed to raise a seed round with Breega and Samaipata — two VC firms that invested in Asdaghi’s previous startup, FoodChéri.
FoodChéri is a full-stack food delivery company that designs its own meals and sells them directly to end customers with an important focus on healthy food. It also operates Seazon, a sister company for batch deliveries. The startup was acquired by Sodexo a few years ago.
“On the day that I left, I started working on food and health projects again,” Asdaghi told me. “I wanted to make an impact, so I started moving up the supply chain and looking at agriculture.”
And the good news is that Asdaghi isn’t the only one looking at the supply chain of the food industry. In France, some companies started working on an eco-score with a public agency (ADEME) overseeing the project. It’s a life cycle assessment that leads to a letter rating from A to E.
While very few brands put these letters on their labels, chances are companies that have good ratings will use the eco-score as a selling point in the coming years.
But these ratings could become even more widespread as regulation is still evolving. The European Union is even working on a standard — the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF). European countries can then create their own scoring systems based on these European criteria, meaning that food companies will need good data on their supply chains.
“The key element in the new eco-score that’s coming up is that there will be some differences within a product category because ingredients and farming methods are different,” Asdaghi said. “It’s going to take into consideration the carbon impact, but also biodiversity, water consumption and animal welfare.”
For instance, when you look at ground beef, it’s extremely important to know whether farmers are using soy from Brazil or grass to feed cattle.
“We don’t want to create the ratings. We want to create the tools that help with calculations — a sort of SAP,” Asdaghi said.
So far, Carbon Maps is working with two companies on pilot programs as it’s going to require a ton of work to cover each vertical in the food industry. The startup creates models with as many criteria as possible to calculate the impact of each criteria. It uses data from standardized sources like GHG Protocol, IPCC, ISO 14040 and 14044.
The company targets food brands because they design the recipes and select their suppliers. Eventually, Carbon Maps hopes that everybody across the supply chain is going to use its platform in one way or another.
“You can’t have a true climate strategy if you don’t have some collaboration across the chain,” Asdaghi said.
Carbon Maps helps the food industry reduce their climate impact by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch
Enlarge / Apple allegedly still holds a ‘grudge’ against Google ever since co-founder Steve Jobs called its rival Android operating system a "stolen product." (credit: FT montage/Reuters)
Apple is taking steps to separate its mobile operating system from features offered by Google parent Alphabet, making advances around maps, search, and advertising that have created a collision course between the Big Tech companies.
The two Silicon Valley giants have been rivals in the smartphone market since Google acquired and popularized the Android operating system in the 2000s.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs called Android “a stolen product” that mimicked Apple’s iOS mobile software, then declared “thermonuclear war” on Google, ousting the search company’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt from the Apple board of directors in 2009.
George Zimmerman profiled Trayvon Martin by making assumptions about his appearance and clothing, negative meanings intended to criminalize and then justify Zimmerman killing Martin, while claiming self-defense. Remember, Zimmerman not only had a gun, but clearly revealed his motivations and assumptions in the 911 call. — Read the rest
The USGS Astrogeology Science Center has recently released a series of colorful and intricately-detailed maps of Mars. These colorful maps, notes USGS, “provide highly detailed views of the [plantet’s] surface and allow scientists to investigate complex geologic relationships both on and beneath the surface. These types of maps are useful for both planning for and then conducting landed missions.”
The map above lets you see Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the solar system, which stands more than twice the height of Mount Everest. The USGS goes on to add: “Map readers can visualize the caldera complex more easily due to the detail that is available at the 1:200,000 scale and the addition of contour lines to the map. The map covers a region that is roughly the size of the Dallas-Ft. Worth metropolitan area and is a detailed look at the volcano’s summit that we have not seen before. This new view of the Olympus Mons caldera complex allows scientists to more easily compare it to similar features on Earth (known as terrestrial analogs) such as Hawaii’s Mauna Loa.”
You can find more Martian maps here.
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