Geo-spatial-temporal time-map of Pine Island Glacier (PIG) publications

Usage: Drag the time bars to the left or right to change the time period displayed. Navigate the map as you would any Google Map: drag to pan, zoom in (double-click, scroll mouse, or use the control on the side), or zoom out (scroll, control). Click on an item in the timeline or area in the map to get more information.

Legend: Each publication is tagged by last name of first author and publication year. Each publication is placed in the timeline at or spanning the years covered by the research or the years in which the data was collected. These dates are based on a quick skim of the articles and may have errors. Exact dates were often not given in which case rough guesses for the month range were used. Modeling studies that used future unspecified dates start at 2015 and go from there some amount into the future.

Each publication was also skimmed to see the geospatial region covered by the article, and this point, line, or area is shown on the map. Regions are rough estimates. Studies that covered the whole Antarctic continent including PIG are just given a large area around the PIG drainage basin.

Future Work

• Improve the geospatial component so that the more precise region of study is highlighted.
• Encode extra information, such as using color and/or icons to denote, for example study type (modeling, geophysical, oceanographic, etc.)
• Allow individual articles to be turned on and off. Right now so many get turned on during the 1990-2005 range that you cannot see anything in the map
• Link to PDFs for downloads
• Build an interface for anyone to submit their own articles (with time and place meta-data).

Lessons learned: Publication lists are full of typos. Even though I use software tools to manage lists of papers and citations from Google Scholar or ISI, I found dozens of typos (and different versions of names). I’m sure some remain even now that I did not find. Triple-check your bibliography.

I’m sure I’m missing some relevant articles. Please let me know of any omissions and errors.

Thanks

• BibDesk
• Timemap

I wanted to geotag all my photos by adding the latitude and longitude to the JPEG EXIF data. I was going to code it as the algorithm is quite simple (for each image, get the creation time, find the GPS location nearest that time in the GPS list, and add the (lat,lon) coordinates to the image), but not surprisingly this problem has already been solved. Repeatedly.

Three steps are required.

1. Convert your GPS data into GPX format. If you are comfortable on the command line then use gpsbabel. If not, then go here for a web interface to gpsbabel. If you need help post in the comments. If you were on NBP09-01 a GPX file of our cruise is here.
2. Add the GPS coordinates to the image EXIF tags. There are many tools that will take a GPX or NMEA file and add latitude and longitude coordinates to your photos. I use gpicsync and photoGPSEditor looks nice too.
3. Output KML files. gpicsync does this for you, and has a list of other software that might help here. You can also upload your photos to Picasa and get a KML file that way (instructions).

The end result might look like this.

You can view all of the photos listed above in the various Antarctica photo albums, or you can view them all geospatially (KMZ) in Google Earth. The ship recorded GPS a few times a second, and I have a one-minute (temporal) resolution data file that I used to geotag the photos.

Notes: If you are viewing the photos on the website, you ought to have the Cooliris plugin installed. Load times might be a bit slow, this computer is hosted at home. If you don’t see any photos in Google Earth you’ll need to drag the time slider to the right. They’ll pop up as you pass the time they were taken.

NBP Photos Geotagged in Google Earth

Me using sextant to measure angle Pine Island Glacier fills vertically in field of view. Distance provided by ship radar. Geometry provides height.

Current location is lat:-72.981, lon:-111.356
 
Photo location is somewhere NW of Pine Island Bay.

Image is approximately 5 mm across. See recent post “PIG Macro” to compare and contrast scales.