| Author |
Message |
    
Mark Howe
Moderator
Username: Unclemark
Post Number: 237
Registered: 08-2003
| | Posted on Monday, September 25, 2006 - 10:07 am: | 
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Beautiful, Susie;
The Ocean Institute wants to start a map of the rocky intertidal zone in the Dana Point Marinelife Refuge, which means that opportunity will also be available to our class. Incidentally, that was also where I wrote my Masters Thesis some 36 years ago. :-)
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Susie Campbell
Senior Member
Username: Susie
Post Number: 149
Registered: 10-2002
| | Posted on Sunday, September 24, 2006 - 06:00 pm: |
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I love Steinbecks discription of the tide pool in Cannery Row.
GIS will help us understand this world even better!
“It is a fabulous place; when the tide is in, wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. But when the tide goes out the little water world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals. Crabs rush from frond to frond of the waving algae. Starfish squat over mussels and limpets, attach their million little suckers and then slowly lift with incredible power until the prey is broken from the rock. And then the starfish stomach comes out and envelops its food. Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranches slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts and fluted waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers. And black eels poke their heads out of crevices and wait for prey. The snapping shrimps with their trigger claws pop loudly. The lovely, colored world is glassed over. Hermit crabs like frantic children scamper on the bottom sand. And now one, finding an empty snail shell he likes better than his own, creeps out, exposing this soft body to the enemy for a moment, and then pops into the new shell. A wave breaks over the barrier, and churns the glassy water for a moment and mixes bubbles into the pool, and then it clears and is tranquil and lovely and murderous again. Here a crab tears a leg from a brother. The anemones expand like soft and brilliant flowers, inviting any tired and perplexed animal to lie for a moment in their arms, and when some small crab or little tide-pool Johnnie accepts the green and purple invitation, the petals whip in, the stinging cells shoot tiny narcotic needles into the prey and it grows weak and perhaps sleepy while the searing caustic digestive acids melt its body down.
Then the creeping murderer, the octopus, steals out, slowly, softly, moving like a grey mist, pretending now to be a bit of weed, now a rock, now a lump of decaying meat while its evil goat eyes watch coldly. It oozes and flows toward a feeding crab, and as it comes close its yellow eyes burn and its body turns rosy with the pulsing color of anticipation and rage. Then suddenly it runs lightly on the tips of its arms, as ferociously as a charging cat. It leaps savagely on the crab, there is a puff of black fluid, and the struggling mass is obstructed in the sepia cloud while the octopus murders the crab. On the exposed rocks out of the water, the barnacles bubble behind their closed doors and the limpets dry out. And down on the rocks come the black flies to eat anything they can find. The sharp smell of iodine from algae, and the lime smell of calcareous bodies and the smell of powerful protean, smell of sperm and ova fill the air. On the exposed rocks the starfish emit semen and eggs from between their rays. The smells of life and richness, of death and digestion, of decay and birth, burden the air. And salt spray blows in from the barrier where the ocean waits for its rising-tide strength to permit it back into the Great Tide Pool again.”
Cannery Row
Steinbeck
Pg. 17-18 |
Mark Howe
Moderator
Username: Unclemark
Post Number: 235
Registered: 08-2003
| | Posted on Friday, September 22, 2006 - 03:50 pm: |
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Hi Sandy;
Assuming you read the GIS: Geographic Information System //class description and the early postings, and Susie's video :-) you are probably wanting the actual definition.
It's not an easy one, but lets say you take a map on a computer that has software that allows you to make changes, and then you think about adding data to the map but it would take up too much room so you just pin little tags to various places, but then you get the idea that you could make an overlay to the map and put all the data on the overlay so you can lay it down or remove it, with everything in the right place, but then you find the software will let you do that easily plus a whole lot of other ways you can manipulate the data on and between the various layers.
What we will do is start with a map of the ocean and the ocean floor beneath. Then we will have layers of fish data and layers of temperature data over time and what's in the mud underneath for the fish to eat and a bazillion other things like oxygen and pH.
It will be interesting to see the effects of global warming and El Nino.
I could go on but I bet you hope i'll stop so I will. :-)
Thanks for asking. |
Sandra Jean Gilman
Intermediate Member
Username: Sandyjgilman
Post Number: 14
Registered: 02-2004
| | Posted on Tuesday, September 19, 2006 - 07:25 am: |
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I am still curious -- what is a "GIS?"
This one has obviously passed me by...
Sandy |
Susie Campbell
Senior Member
Username: Susie
Post Number: 148
Registered: 10-2002
| | Posted on Friday, June 23, 2006 - 12:22 pm: |
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I'm going to get myself "very well prepared indeed" and take the Into. to Oceanography class to see if I have what it takes to enter into this field. I don't see the GIS 110 in the Saddleback catalog. Is it under something other than Marine Sciecne or Marine science technology? |
Mark Howe
Moderator
Username: Unclemark
Post Number: 218
Registered: 08-2003
| | Posted on Friday, June 23, 2006 - 10:26 am: |
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Thanks Susie; that was a good overview of the capabilities of GIS. At the end was an invitation to look at www.gis.com. There are mapping sites to play with there but they don't seem to work very well yet.
Everybody should at one time play with google earth.com. If you haven't you have missed out on an awesome thing. Find your house; that's usually the first thing everybody wants to do.
What we will be doing in class will ultimately be easier, better and more specific to the things you want to find out. For now, get used to turning on and off layers of information on a map and zooming in and out of places you have interest in.
If this catches your fancy, let me know and sign up for the class. |
Susie Campbell
Senior Member
Username: Susie
Post Number: 147
Registered: 10-2002
| | Posted on Wednesday, June 21, 2006 - 02:12 pm: |
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This gives you a good understanding of GIS is our everyday lives.
http://www.esri.com/company/gis_touches/everyday.html |
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