UK Flooding Interactive Map

G.Lilley-Moncrief has used ArcGIS Explorer Online to create an excellent case study of flooding in the UK. Whilst it focuses mainly on the floods of 2012, there are some others there too. It will work best if opened into a bigger browser window using the link uner the map..



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What Influence the effects of earthquakes?

The map below shows major earthquakes (magnitude in red circles) and their effects (blue squares = no of deaths). Investigate what they show using the mouse to click symbols for further info then try to work out why they differ so greatly.


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Santa Cruz Aftershocks

Large earthquakes will often be followed by many aftershocks. The one near the Solomon Islands yesterday has had a number. The map below illustrates it excellently:

A number of the aftershocks have been greater than 5 on the richter scale.

A couple of questions that might guide your thinking:
Why might aftershocks still cause much damage though they are smaller than the original earthquake? Can people prepare for aftershocks?

Click on the map above to go to its live site hosted by the USGS, or click below to see another aftershock map of the area from earthquaketrack.com HERE.

How has recent weather affected our school?

Year 12 pupils had a lesson to collect and then contribute to a map of the effects of the recent bad weather on our school community.

The video below shows the storm patterns on the 24th and 25th which began to flood the river and saturate the soil. this was compounded by further rain on the 26th, 27th and 28th and then frost on the 30th and 1st of December.



The map below should interactively show the observations. Click on a placemark to see the observations and some images. There is more to come soon as well.
There is also one placemark 11km North West of the school in Harrold referring to the bridge being blocked. The rain clouds west of the school show weather data from the last two weeks.



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ArcGIS - Latest Practise

Mr Rees has been experimenting with making ArcGIS online a useful tool for presentation of fieldwork and data. Have a go with the interactive map below and consider how you could use it for your project:

Excellent Swanage Map

Below is an excellent map of the Isle of Purbeck made by Tom Lousada. Underneath he details how he created it. This is a very useful set of skills to practise in general, but they will be particularly helpful for writing up fieldwork projects.
(To see the map in a larger format, just click on it)

Slide Background:
The slide background was a screenshot taken off Google Earth. The Google Earth Image had been created by Pinpointing various geological features; i.e. Durdle Door, using the Pinpoint button on the top bar.
The layers of rock geology were created by drawing a polygon over the areas of each rock type. The data for this was taken from the booklet we received before beginning the task. These polygons were then made only 60% opaque and pinned to the ground so that we could see the land underneath.
Making sure only the Pins and the polygons were ticked on the side bar, the screen was then print screened and pasted into Paint where it was then cropped and saved as an image. A PowerPoint document was then opened up and the layout changed to blank. By right-clicking on the slide, format background was selected and the Google Earth picture was selected from a file. The edges were then edited so that the picture was 0 on every side.

Pictures on slide:
After finding pictures of each geological feature on Google, they were all pasted onto the document. Making sure that they were all selected as ‘tight’ in the text wrapping pane, they were spread evenly around the document, avoiding the top and bottom right hand corners, with each picture near to its corresponding Pinpoint.
Arrows were then inserted from the pictures to their Pinpoints and the colour changed so that they could be easily seen against the background.

Title and Key:The title and key were both created by inserting a textbox into the top and bottom right-hand corners and then changing the ‘fill’ of the textbox to white. At the top, the title was written in bold and underlined in a large font, while underneath was a brief summary of what the slide showed and how they were formed. At the bottom, a key was placed describing the colours of the geology on the background in terms of what rock type they were (and whether they were more or less resistant).

By Tom Lousada

Using ArcGIS

We have found ArcGIS a very useful programme of late for presenting spatial maps in the A level fieldwork writeups. It is going to also prove useful for the GCSE writeups. the explorer online version has been very effective and efficient.

Here are a couple of examples of year 10's first efforts.

M.Guan has presented theoretical ranges of different stores in his local area in Hong Kong.

D.Frossell has used it to create layers of different parts of the Bedford Golf Course.

G.I.S map by M.Guan

Golf Course by D.Frossell

If you want to have a go.....

Get on to http://explorer.arcgis.com/