Japan Tsunami Wreaks Havoc in Antarctica

Sometimes I am in awe of the power of nature - and the way in which technology allows us to understand some of what goes on under the hood of nature is equally compelling.

I follow the NASA Earth Observatory on  a semi regular basis - they way in which they capture changes to the planet over time I find pretty cool. But today I was blown away with just how cool some of their stuff - and their people - really are.

We all saw those horrific pictures from Japan back in March. In fact, our school is currently hosting a number of students from Japan who have been badly affected by that event and what followed.

But who would have thought that the tsunami generated would be capable of ripping huge chunks of ice off the Sulzberger ice shelf in Antarctica hours later.

Sometimes I wish was a geography teacher. This is one of them!

Photosynth and ICE: Make a Geography Field Trip Come Alive Back in the Classroom

I had the opportunity yesterday to spend the day with some senior geography students on their field trip to Bethells Beach. My reason for tagging along - to see if the free tools from Microsoft Labs that I have been playing around with, Photosynth and ICE, have an application in the Geography space.

The first part of the field trip was across the "inland" dunes to Lake Wainamu . These dunes are pretty cool and they have dammed a river to form a dune lake - but to get an idea of of the scale of it from a single picture is hard to do. That's why I used ICE - to take a series of 360 degree shots and stitch them together using ICE, then output to Photosynth. By doing this you not only get a true sense of the scale of the dunes and their position relative to the rest of the surrounding terrain, but the ability to zoom in that is provided gives you the opportunity to do what niether a video nor a still image can do.

The Photosynth web site sums it up pretty well: "Different than static photos and video, Photosynth allows you to explore details of places, objects, and events unlike any other media. You can’t stop video, move around and zoom in to check out the smallest details, but with Photosynth you can. And you can’t look at a photo gallery and immediately see the spatial relation between the photos, but with Photosynth you can."

Here are a couple of panoramas stitched in ICE and uploaded to Photosynth.

This first shows the view you first get as you approach the dunes - the lake is over the mound of sand - still some distance away.


This shows the view from the top of the first part of the dunes to one of the stream beds where the lake empties. As this is the end of summer, not a lot of water flow here.


This shows the lake (you'll need to scroll to get a view of it).

So, this is the first thing that you can do with ICE and Photosynth - take a series of photos and then use the two software tools to create the effect. Very simple. In case you are interested, I used a stock standard Canon A560 digital camera on wide angle (no zoom) and a tripod. I took a new photo every 10 degrees as I rotated from the same spot.

The other aspect of Photosynth I wanted to experiment with was how to re-create the feel of actually being at the live site for someone (eg a student unable to make the trip) - to provide a better experience than just watching a series of still photos or a video.

Bethells has the same geologic processes happening at each end of it's beach, but due to the variation in the rock at either end the results are different. (I learned that from the geography teacher on the day - to me they were just rocks at both ends ... but know I think I'm an expert!)

Each end has a cave - and while I'd been to the southern cave before, I had never been to the northern ones. So the following two synths show both sets of caves - the first is the northern end and the second the southern end.





For the record, I used 53 photos to make the first synth of the northern caves, and 78 photos to create the second synth of the southern end.

I'm very impressed by both pieces of software. From early indications, so are the geographers who let me sneak along on their trip. I actually shot just under 900 photos on the day (glad I took some spare batteries), and I still have some more to process and create some stuff with.

But its easy. That's the great thing. And it may just be really useful too. Just imagine being able to use these images on a SmartBoard ...