The 50th anniversary of the original Earth Day was earlier this week. While the U.S. has made strides in controlling some pollutants, others, like the toxic fluorinated compounds known collectively as PFAS, remain a problem and persist in the environment for a very long time. This interactive map shows known PFAS contamination sites in the U.S. www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/2019_pfas_contamination/map/
0 Comments
This map from a recent New York Times article highlights the 500 U.S. counties that contribute the largest numbers of U.S. Army recruits, as a percentage of population. "More and more, new recruits are the children of old recruits. In 2019, 79 percent of Army recruits reported having a family member who served. For nearly 30 percent, it was a parent — a striking point in a nation where less than 1 percent of the population serves in the military. For years, military leaders have been sounding the alarm over the growing gulf between communities that serve and those that do not, warning that relying on a small number of counties that reliably produce soldiers is unsustainable...." www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/us/military-enlistment.html
Atlas Obscura looks at 12 "ghost islands" around the world, islands that were once inhabited, some supporting large populations, but have been abandoned. Each has an interesting story to tell. www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-incredible-ruins-of-12-abandoned-islands
This map shows regional control of territory within Syria prior to this week's offensive by Turkish forces into the Kurdish-held region in the northeastern part of the country.
infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_19580_territory_controlled_by_faction_in_syria_n.jpg This graphic looks at 2018 military spending by country. The US and China accounted for nearly half of global military spending in 2018. howmuch.net/articles/the-worlds-military-spending
This series of maps, from The Economist (UK), show "deaths due to conflict" in Afghanistan over the last 20 years. In 2018, Afghanistan experienced more deaths due to conflict than Syria. Moreover, "A majority of Afghans now live in areas controlled or contested by the Taliban." (Because these maps end with the most recent full-year data, they do not include 2019 casualties, including the massive death toll from last weekend's bombing of a wedding by the Islamic State.) www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/08/15/violence-in-afghanistan-last-year-was-worse-than-in-syria
The Imperial Japanese Navy lost 334 ships during World War II. This map captures the final resting place of most of them. worldwarwings.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/ships-map.jpg
Here's a thematic map one doesn't see every day: this map shows which parts of the world historically used elephants in battle.
www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/c6ifji/historical_range_of_the_use_of_war_elephants/ Libya's low-burner civil war has been back in the news this week with both the upcoming Libyan National Conference and the not-coincidentally-timed advance of Field Marshal Khalifa Hifter on the capital of Tripoli. This article from Al Monitor provides context on Hifter's moves.
"All Arab civil wars are not created equal. Libya has been in a state of civil war for five years now, yet it hasn’t been a civil war full of massacres or famines like the sectarian wars in Yemen and Syria. Libya’s war has certain highly unusual characteristics: low death tolls, high diffusion of arms, two governments (both of whom claim sovereignty but do not actually exercise it), extreme fragmentation of fighting forces, and the same central bank paying the fighters on all sides. From a military perspective, the defining characteristic of Libya’s war relates to how territory is captured. Where there have been protracted pitched battles, usually against jihadists, exchange of territory happens slowly and destructively. Conversely, where there have been huge gains and losses of territory, it usually transpires with groups being bought off to switch their allegiances, or with one force marching its column of technicals across a highway and the other side running away with nary a shot being fired. What does this say for the prospects to resolve Libya’s civil war militarily, as one actor is now trying to do?" https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2019/04/libya-khalifa-hifter-offensive-tripoli.html#ixzz5kc4rFY4g The world seems to have lost interest in Syria. This article from Foreign Policy takes a closer look at what's going on in Syria right now:
"The war that has ravaged Syria over the last half-decade is coming to an end. The caliphate declared by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State organization ... now consists of a few ravaged square meters in Baghouz, in Syria’s Lower Euphrates River Valley, that are on the verge of falling to Kurdish forces. The mainly Sunni Arab rebellion against the Bashar al-Assad regime, meanwhile, is already over. What remains of it is now the military component of a Turkish project to turn a corner of northwest Syria into a Turkish client entity. In place of the old wars, however, three new ones have started. They are taking place in the three de facto independent areas whose boundaries are becoming apparent as the smoke from the previous battle clears: the regime-controlled area, guaranteed by Russia; the area east of the Euphrates River controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces, which are primarily composed of Kurdish fighters protected by the United States and Western air power; and finally the area controlled by the Turks and their Sunni Islamist allies in Idlib province. The regime area consists of about 60 percent of the territory of the country, the SDF has around 30 percent, and the Turkish-Sunni Islamist area is around 10 percent. Each of these areas is now hosting a civil war of its own, supported by neighboring enclaves." foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/18/syrias-civil-war-is-now-3-civil-wars/#39;s%20Picks%20OC Approximately 165,000 active duty U.S. military personnel serve outside the U.S. and its territories. This geo-graphic shows where U.S. military personnel are stationed and where those numbers are growing and shrinking. (Note: Guam is a U.S. territory, and service members stationed in Guam would not be included in the 165,000 deployed overseas.) www.statista.com/chart/17355/us-military-overseas/
Selling arms is big business. How big? This geo-graphic shows the world's biggest arms exporters and importers. Some may be surprising. howmuch.net/articles/worlds-biggest-military-weapons-exporters-and-importers
Last month the United Nations sponsored talks in Palermo, Sicily, on stabilizing Libya and setting the groundwork for a national conference, and possibly elections, in Libya in early 2019. Politically and militarily, though, the situation on the ground in Libya remains complex and volatile, as this map showing regions of control from earlier this year suggests: www.polgeonow.com/2018/07/libyan-civil-war-map-libya-who-controls-what.html Even the capital of Tripoli is divided by competing factions as this more granular map shows: www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/tripoli-a-kaleidoscope
The London-based risk consultancy firm Control Risks has assembled its 2018 assessment of political and security risks, by country, by region within certain countries, and for bodies of water with piracy risks. Check it out at cdn-prd-com.azureedge.net/-/media/corporate/files/riskmap-2018/maps/riskmap-map-2018-uk-web.pdf
"Would you fight for your country?" A Gallup survey of more than 62,000 people in 64 countries found that an average of 61% of people surveyed said they would be willing to fight for their country. There were significant regional differences, though. In the Middle East and North Africa, 83% of respondents indicated a willingness to fight for their country. In Japan and Germany, by contrast, the numbers were 11% and 18%, respectively. This map shows the data for Europe and links to a news release with global data: https://brilliantmaps.com/europe-fight-war/
This article from The New York Times compares two maps of Afghanistan: one shows the area the U.S. government said the Taliban controlled in May of this year and the other shows the area military analysts say the Taliban controlled at that point in time. October 7 will mark the 17-year-anniversary of U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/08/world/asia/us-misleads-on-afghanistan.html
Syria's army is preparing to attack the last major pocket of rebellion: Idlib Province (in yellow on this map). Idlib, which abuts the Turkish border, is currently home to an estimated 30,000 rebel fighters and 3 million civilians, many of whom were displaced from Aleppo and elsewhere in Syria by earlier fighting. www.npr.org/news/graphics/2018/01/map-syria-governorates-idlib.png
The Nok Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in northern Togo, might look a bit like the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, for example, but they were built by Togo's Moba people in the 18th and 19th centuries for a very different purpose: instead of being permanent dwellings, the Nok Caves served as a well-stocked hiding place whenever an enemy tribe raided Moba villages to find people to sell to slave traders in exchange for guns and horses. www.atlasobscura.com/places/nok-caves
With NATO in the news, it's useful to revisit a map of NATO. NATO members are shown in grey here. In nearly 70 years, NATO's mutual defense provision (Article 5) has been invoked only once: to defend the U.S. after 9/11. This interactive site allows users to see where NATO is engaged and potential security hot spots identified by NATO: www.nato.int/nato-on-the-map
Earlier this week marked the 73rd anniversary of the first nuclear bomb detonation (code name: Trinity), conducted in the New Mexico desert by the U.S. Army on July 16, 1945. This video maps all of the known nuclear bomb detonations, beginning with Trinity and continuing through North Korea's second announced nuclear test in 2009. For flag aficionados, there's a running tally, by flag, at the bottom of the video. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGFkw0hzW1c Yesterday's post mentioned U.S. military engagement in 76 countries. This map, from Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, shows where the U.S. is currently known to have troops, military advisors, or drones. (It is estimated that classified special ops activity may add two dozen more countries.) images03.military.com/sites/default/files/styles/full/public/2018-05/us-military-global-activity_1200x800.jpg
The red dots on this map of the contiguous United States are military bases. cdoovision.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/map-of-all-us-military-bases-16701444809042849-18f170f042-z.jpg
Although the Taliban remains the primary insurgency in Afghanistan, the U.S. military is re-engaging the Islamic State in Afghanistan's Momand Dara district, near the Pakistan border, where the Islamic State is seeking to expand its territory. Momand Dara includes the city of Torkham, which is the busiest crossing point between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
gdb.rferl.org/10935180-448D-47E3-A019-E98D8D35840E_w650_r0_s.png One of the students in my online science fiction class ("Who We Are & What We Dream: Comparative Science Fiction") shared this amazingly cool site that tracks cyberattacks in real-time: map.norsecorp.com/#/
Three years in, the civil war in Yemen shows no signs of a resolution and has devolved into one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, marked by cholera, widespread malnutrition, and mass displacement of civilian populations in addition to an average of one air strike every 100 minutes by the Saudi-led coalition. This map, from a recent report by Chatham House (UK), scratches the surface of the complexity of the Yemeni situation. reader.chathamhouse.org/epubs/631/images/CHHJ5863-Yemen-Map1-Internal-Divisions.png
For the full report, see www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/publications/research/2017-12-20-yemen-national-chaos-local-order-salisbury2.pdf |
Blog sharing news about geography, philosophy, world affairs, and outside-the-box learning
Archives
December 2023
Categories
All
|