Rebecca Maxwell, Author at Geography Realm

Some areas of the Southern Antarctic Peninsula have lost up to 30 m in ice since 2009. Source: University of Bristol

Ice Loss in Antarctica

August 16, 2015 by Rebecca Maxwell

In the last six years, a 750 kilometer (466 mile) strip of Antarctica has been shedding ice into the ocean at a rate of about 60 cubic km each year according to data collected from Cryosat-2.

Why Do We Blindly Follow Our GPS?

August 12, 2020July 30, 2015 by Rebecca Maxwell

Stories abound of people blindly following GPS directions, leading to the term “death by GPS”. Why do people put so much faith in digital directions?

Base map: Equal Earth Physical Map, public domain

What is the Nationality of a Baby Born on an Airplane?

August 29, 2020May 31, 2015 by Rebecca Maxwell

It is a question that confounds the most geographically and legally astute: what is the nationality of a baby born on an airplane?

Project based learning using the Iditarod sled dog race in Alaska.

Using Google Earth to Teach Math

August 12, 2020April 20, 2015 by Rebecca Maxwell

Every math teacher knows the difficulty in trying to convince their students why math matters. It is often hard to see that math is useful … Read more

Map showing locations of plots included in this study. Map: Brienen et al, 2015.

Reducing Climate Change Could Be More Difficult in the Future

August 12, 2020April 8, 2015 by Rebecca Maxwell

A recent study has declared that limiting climate change in the future could be more difficult due to shifting conditions in the Amazon forest. The … Read more

The geography of aboveground carbon density (ACD) throughout Perú, derived at a 1-ha resolution with uncertainty reported for each hectare. Source: Asner et al, 2014.

Mapping Carbon in the Amazon

August 8, 2019December 10, 2014 by Rebecca Maxwell

In order to produce the most detailed carbon maps of the Amazon, researchers turned to remote sensing, specifically satellite imagery and LiDAR.

The results demonstrated that the visual map of the tadpoles developed naturally when the bars moved from front to back. The tadpoles that were shown the images in reverse order, however, extended nerve fibers to the wrong spots in the map, confirming that the brain would perceive those images as backwards.

How Mental Map Development Affects How We Perceive the Visual World Around Us

March 5, 2020December 2, 2014 by Rebecca Maxwell

A new study from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, is challenging the way scientists look at the brain’s visual system.

Monthly 700 hPa vertical velocity anomalies (Pa/s) from October of 1933 through March of 1934, calculated from the 20th Century Reanalysis. All anomalies are calculated relative to the baseline period of 1931–1990.

New Study Discovers the Worst Drought of the Millennium Occurred in 1934

November 14, 2014 by Rebecca Maxwell

According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the worst drought of the last thousand years occurred in 1934 at the height of the … Read more

On Sept. 19, 2014, the five-day average of Antarctic sea ice extent exceeded 20 million square kilometers for the first time since 1979, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The red line shows the average maximum extent from 1979-2014. Image Credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio/Cindy Starr

New Record Extent of Sea Ice in Antarctica

October 16, 2014October 16, 2014 by Rebecca Maxwell

The polar regions of the Earth, the Arctic Ocean and Antarctica, are of particular concern to scientists and researchers. In one sense, these areas act … Read more

A digital camera on NASA’s ER-2 airplane captured this top-down view of a melt pond atop a glacier in southeastern Alaska on July 16, 2014. Chunks of ice float on the pond’s turquoise water.

Melt Ponds and the Prediction of Ice Melt

October 7, 2014 by Rebecca Maxwell

One of the biggest environmental concerns is that of global climate change. Symptoms of major shifts in the Earth’s climate are everywhere from the melting … Read more

$Map of the North Atlantic Ocean showing gravity anomalies. Marine gravity model of the North Atlantic (10 mGal contours). Red dots show locations of earthquakes with magnitude > 5.5 and they highlight the present-day location of the seafloor spreading ridges and transform faults. This gravity information shows the details of the plate tectonic history of the rifting of these continents including the subtle signatures of fracture zones that are currently buried by sediment.$

An Ocean of Mountains

September 5, 2020October 6, 2014 by Rebecca Maxwell

With the help of satellite technology, a team of American and European researchers recently announced that they have discovered thousands of new mountains on the ocean floor.

Mind Over Map: How Our Concepts of Reality Affect Map Making and Vice Versa

March 5, 2020September 29, 2014 by Rebecca Maxwell

The nature of maps as portrayals of the world mean that they can both represent physical reality but also create it at the same time.

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