'Cartographies of Energy and the Environment" at NACIS 2014

Yesterday, SkyTruth Communications Director David Manthos was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania talking about "Cartographies of Energy and the Environment" at the Annual Meeting of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS).

.@DavidManthos: maps disclose the environ impact of mountain top removal coal mining. #NACIS2014 #energyGeographies pic.twitter.com/FspEpYVLVZ
— Rich Donohue (@rgdonohue) October 9, 2014

This year's conference theme is Cartography and Time, offering a perfect opportunity to cover some of the ways we try to display the passage of time in our maps and images. They include this handy tool to let you compare a change over-time (like how much land the Gulf Coast has lost since 1972) just by sliding your mouse back and forth.

Read below the break for the slides and more visualization examples...




Or a simple GIF of drilling activity in Pennsylvania, as determined by our FrackFinder projects.

Or a flashy animation of all the natural gas flaring around the world, updated nightly with new satellite data from NOAA.

We shared the panel with John Cloud, a historian working for NOAA to document how experimental steamships built in Pittsburgh played a major role in surveying U.S. Coastal waters before the Civil War, and Matt Kelso from our friends at the FracTracker Alliance on how shale gas drilling today is transforming the landscape around Pittsburgh and beyond.

Skytruthing the Impact of Human Activity on the Environment