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“Each dive feels like floating into a science fiction film”
[Image: Schmidt Ocean Institute, via ScienceDaily]. It’s hard to resist a headline claiming that “otherworldly mirror pools and mesmerizing landscapes” have been “discovered on [the] ocean floor.”...
View Article300 Years of Dust
I’m late to the news that the ancient Akkadian Empire might have collapsed due to “dust activity” that “persisted for 300 years.” As a resident of Los Angeles, it’s sobering to read. “Archaeologists...
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Terrestrial Concussion / Infinite Half-Life
[Image: Courtesy Xenon Collaboration, via ScienceNews]. Earthquakes, popularly seen as discrete, large-scale events that occur only once every few years—once a decade, once a century, once every...
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Have Clock, Will Travel
[Image: From The Hunt For Red October, via Quora]. There’s a line in The Hunt For Red October where a submarine navigator jokes, “Give me a stopwatch and a map, and I’ll fly the Alps in a plane with no...
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The Atlas of Natural Regions
[Image: “Saint-Valentin, Champagne berrichonne (Centre-Val-de-Loire), 2019, by Eric Tabuchi]. I’ve been enjoying the Instagram account of photographer Eric Tabuchi for quite a while now. Tabuchi is...
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Walker Lane Redux
It’s been an interesting few days here in Southern California, with several large earthquakes and an ensuing aftershock sequence out in the desert near Ridgecrest. Ridgecrest, of course, is at the very...
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Terrestrial Oceanica
I’m grateful for two recent opportunities to publish op-eds, one for the Los Angeles Times back in May and the other just this morning in the New York Times. Both look at seismic activity and its...
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Terrestrial Warfare, Drowned Lands
While looking at maps of rural New York State, roughly 70 miles northwest of Manhattan, near the border with New Jersey, I noticed a series of small communities called “Islands.” Pine Island, Maple...
View ArticleExotempestology
Purely in terms of extreme landscapes, this planet is certainly one of the most notable: eight times the mass of Jupiter, but starless, adrift, an “orphaned world” without a sun, “somehow shot out of...
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A Spatial History of Sleep
[Image: Fish preserved in the eternal ocean of a closed jar at the American Museum of Natural History; old Instagram by Geoff Manaugh]. Although this is a classic example of something I am totally...
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Class Action
[Image: Still from the end of Garbage, Gangsters and Greed.] I have a long new feature up at The Guardian this weekend that tells the story of an English teacher at Middletown High School, in upstate...
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The Spatial Politics of Geofencing
[Image: From Code of Conscience.] Another project I meant to write about ages ago is Code of Conscience, developed by AKQA. It is “an open source software update that restricts the use of heavy-duty...
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Geometries of Sovereignty
[Image: “Minimal Republic nº3, Area: 100 m², Border: square, 10m side, defined with rope tied to pickaxes around a square of crushed rye, Population: 1 inhabitant, Location: 41.298691º, -3.400101º,...
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Forest Accumulator
Ten years ago, this would have been a speculative design project by Sascha Pohflepp: “hyper-accumulating” plants are being used to concentrate, and thus “mine,” valuable metals from soil. [Image:...
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PoMo- Mytho- Geo-
[Image: “Model of an Earth Fastener on the Delphi Fault (Temple of Apollo)” (2019) by Kylie White; photo courtesy Moskowitz Bayse.] Artist Kylie White has two new pieces up in a group show here in Los...
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Tax Incentives and the Human Imagination
[Image: Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer by Caspar David Friedrich (c. 1818).] It would be interesting to look at locations of the American popular imagination, as seen in movies and TV, mapped against...
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Underground Cathedrals of Radiation and Zones of Irreversible Strain
[Image: Nevada test site, Google Maps, filtered through Instagram.] There’s a great line in Tom Zoellner’s book Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World where he describes the...
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The Glacial Gothic, or the Cathedral as an “Avalanche on Pause”
[Image: Diagram from The Stones of Venice by John Ruskin.] There are at least two interesting moments in John Ruskin’s book The Stones of Venice. One is his description of buttresses. Buttresses,...
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Men in Space
[Image: Caspar David Friedrich, “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” (c. 1818).] [NOTE: I have dozens of posts—from book reviews to news items—sitting in my drafts folder that I never published for some...
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Geometries of Sovereignty
[Image: “Minimal Republic nº3, Area: 100 m², Border: square, 10m side, defined with rope tied to pickaxes around a square of crushed rye, Population: 1 inhabitant, Location: 41.298691º, -3.400101º,...
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