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This geo-graphic from Statista looks at which metro areas have the most installed data farm capacity: www.statista.com/chart/31372/regions-cities-with-highest-data-center-power-capacity
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Iceland sits atop a divergent tectonic plate boundary, where the North American plate and the Eurasian plate are pulling apart. Yesterday, a volcanic fissure, about 4 km long, started to spurt lava only 10 km from Iceland's famous Blue Lagoon. This map shows some of Iceland's 32 active volcanoes. The current activity is on the Reykjanes peninsula extending from Iceland's southwestern coast. d8ys5mrbqhmjx.cloudfront.net/reykjavik/blog/12-surprising-facts-about-icelandic-volcanoes/large/12-surprising-facts-about-icelandic-volcanoes-242486.jpg
France is not a country that comes up too often in a clean energy conversation, but France has "a potentially mammoth cache of so-called white hydrogen, one of the cleanest-burning fuels in nature." Scientists believe the hydrogen reserves under abandoned coal mines in Lorraine, in northeastern France, could total as much as 260 million metric tons. "According to the U.S. Geological Survey, just a small fraction of these deposits could provide enough clean energy for hundreds of years." www.nytimes.com/2023/12/04/business/energy-environment/clean-energy-hydrogen.html
It is assumed the Russian government will try to use the fighting between Israel and Hamas as a wedge issue in European countries, like France, that have large Jewish and Muslim populations in order to promote domestic turmoil in those countries and erode their support for Ukraine. The recent appearance of hundreds of spray-painted Stars of David, along with pro-Palestine slogans, is one concrete example currently being investigated by French police: www.al-monitor.com/originals/2023/11/france-investigates-suspected-russian-role-star-david-graffiti-paris
Europe is heading into its second winter without Russian gas. This map shows the expansion of LNG (liquified natural gas) terminals across Europe:
www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/paragraph_text_image/public/paragraphs/images/europeanunion-lng-infrastructure-early2022.jpg Mount Vesuvius is arguably the most famous volcano near Naples, Italy, but it's not the largest: the supervolcano Campi Flegrei sits just to the west of Naples, and a swarm of earthquakes over the last few months suggests the volcano is stirring. Campi Flegrei ("Phlegraean Fields") is not a conical stratovolcano like Vesuvius; instead it is a bowl-shaped caldera, eight miles wide, with 24 craters, a park showcasing its geothermal features, vineyards producing Campi Flegrei wine, and a population of about 500,000. The last major eruption of Campi Flegrei was in 1538. An eruption about 39,000 years ago is believed to have contributed to the extinction of the Neanderthals. upload.wikimedia.org/wikiversity/en/2/27/Campi_Flegrei_caldera.jpg
Fast forward to 2050: this geo-graphic from Statista looks at the anticipated number of retirees per 100 working people, in selected countries, in 2020 vs. 2050. Numbers in 2050 range from 40.4 retirees per 100 working people in the U.S. to 80.7 (!) retirees per 100 working people in Japan. The length of the bar highlights the change in value from 2020 to 2050. www.statista.com/chart/30831/evolution-of-the-number-of-retirees-per-100-working-people
Most people are familiar with the concept of life expectancy. Less familiar are the many variants on life expectancy, including "healthy life expectancy" (HALE), which is defined by the World Health Organization as the "average number of years that a person can expect to live in 'full health' by taking into account years lived in less than full health due to disease and/or injury." This map shows the countries with the largest gap between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy -- or, thought of another way, with the most years of unhealthy old age -- as of 2019. The U.S. tops the list, with a gap of 12.4 years, followed by Australia, at 12.1 years. Completing the top 10 are New Zealand, the UK, Norway, Spain and Italy (tied), Iran, and Canada, Kuwait, and Switzerland (tied).  AMOC (pronounced "ay-mock")-- the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation -- is a network of Atlantic Ocean currents, including the Gulf Stream, that plays a pivotal role in keeping Western Europe warm relative to its latitude and distributing heat around the planet. Multiple studies have found AMOC is weakening and is now perhaps the weakest it has been in 1,000 years. The massive melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which is dumping an estimated 250 billion metric tons of ice and cold, fresh meltwater into the northern Atlantic each year, is eyed as a possible culprit. Last week a study by Danish researchers of 150 years of weather data concluded that AMOC could collapse -- as it did 12,800 years ago -- by the end of the century, perhaps even within a few years. This article from Scientific American explains the science, the unknowns, and AMOC's significance: www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-a-mega-ocean-current-about-to-shut-down/.
Facing ongoing drought conditions, Spain is one of several countries looking to resurrect water-delivery systems hundreds or thousands of years old. This article is about Spain's acequias system, an extensive network of canals originally built by the Moors to deliver water from the mountains to communities across southern Spain. www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/world/europe/spain-drought-acequias.html
This map shows the peak range of woolly mammoths using both a Fuller or Dymaxion map projection and a conventional (Mercator-like) map projection. Buckminster Fuller created the Dymaxion projection in the 1940s to better preserve the sizes and shapes of landmasses. brilliantmaps.com/woolly-mammoths
This BBC article shares maps about areas of control in Ukraine as well as the complex dam system affected by the destruction of the Kakhovka dam and reservoir: www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60506682 (Note: maps about current fighting in Ukraine are regularly updated at the Institute for the Study of War.)
This map looks at the 2nd largest nationality living in each European country. Deciphering it may be an opportunity for some flag research, though :-). brilliantmaps.com/2nd-largest-nationality/
Images of the earth at night can reveal a great deal about population, economics, land use, and the availability of electricity. In this article, The New York Times has assembled a series of satellite images to illustrate how all of these factors have changed on the ground in Ukraine since Nov. 2021. www.nytimes.com/2023/03/30/world/europe/ukraine-satellite-darkness.html
Landmines often persist long after a conflict ends. This map, based on data from an NGO that monitors landmines and operations to clear them, shows where landmines still exist, more than 25 years after a UN treaty that bans their use: cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/26209.jpeg
The AidData lab at the College of William & Mary has found 22 countries that have relied on often-opaque emergency lending from China since 2000, either via liquidity swaps with China's central bank or lines of credit from state-owned Chinese banks. This emergency lending is often at higher interest rates than emergency loans from the IMF, for example, and may not be recorded as external debt, concealing a country's actual debt load. www.statista.com/chart/29603/chinese-emergency-bailouts
The statistics in this article from The New York Times Magazine are rather stunning, as is its conclusion about the cause of Britain's precipitous decline: "In December, as many as 500 patients per week were dying in Britain because of E.R. waits, according to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, a figure rivaling (and perhaps surpassing) the death toll from Covid-19. ... By the end of next year, the average British family will be less well off than the average Slovenian one, according to a recent analysis by John Burn-Murdoch at The Financial Times; by the end of this decade, the average British family will have a lower standard of living than the average Polish one." www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/opinion/uk-economic-decline-nhs.html
This map from Geographical (UK) is a reminder that the Eurasian plate, from Italy through Iran, is intensely seismically active: geographical.co.uk/science-environment/danger-zones-mapping-earthquakes-in-europe
As this map shows, thus far, the winter has proved warmer than usual in most of Europe, which has allowed natural gas and other energy prices to fall back to more normal levels. But a colder-than-usual winter in parts of Asia is creating natural gas shortages and heating problems in China, in particular. (Map from www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/business/china-natural-gas-shortages.html.)
This geo-graphic from Statista looks at "land grabs" in the developing world, defined as "the buying, leasing or concession land use for commercial purposes by companies from abroad, affecting land that had previously been used communally, by small-scale shareholders or was natural environment." (Until 2019, the country experiencing the most land grabs was Peru, but Peru is not on this list because it has been reclassified as an upper-middle income country.) cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/19044.jpeg
What is a "dunkelflaute" and why does it matter? Without access to Russian gas, European consumers are at the mercy of Mother Nature: specifically, a particularly cold winter this year will spell trouble for energy supplies for the next 12 months and possibly beyond. A dunkelflaute is a German word that refers to cloudy, cold, windless weather -- the kind that increases heating demands while shutting down solar and wind production. The UK, for example, experienced a multi-day dunkelflaute earlier this month, with snow falling in London and wind energy dropping from 20% of the UK's electricity mix to 4%. qz.com/can-europe-survive-the-dreaded-dunkelflaute-1849886529
Working on behalf of a free press and the public's right to know is often a dangerous job. War zones figure into this map showing where the most journalists were killed in 2022, but Mexico continues to be the most dangerous place to be a journalist: cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/1181.jpeg
Which countries have the largest share of their populations living abroad? It turns out island nations -- nearly one out of three Polynesians is living outside of their home country, for example -- and, not surprisingly, countries with stagnant economies and/or conflict are high on the list. This geo-graphic from Statista looks at the top 8 countries (min. population size 750,000) and a sampling of others: www.statista.com/chart/4237/the-countries-with-the-most-people-living-overseas
Negotiations over a "cap" on the price paid for Russian oil has been in the news recently. This geo-graphic from Al Jazeera highlights Russia's role in global oil markets: bucket.mlcdn.com/a/2764/2764870/images/e37fb5d7fa9398245e8017714bc383775d23a256.png
This topological map from Visual Capitalist shows the number and percentage of each country's population deemed to be at high risk from once-in-a-century flooding, like the floods that inundated more than one-third of Pakistan earlier this fall, killing more than 1,700 people, destroying buildings and crops, and creating lasting crises in food security, education, and waterborne disease. www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-highest-flood-risk/
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