Iraq Country Analysis Brief
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/iraq.html
"Iraq holds more than 112 billion barrels of oil -- the world's second largest proven reserves. Iraq also contains 110 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and is a focal point for regional and international security issues." Provided by the Energy Information Administration of the Department of Energy, the Iraq Country Analysis Brief Web site provides a thorough description of the mineral resources available in the country as of February 2003. Visitors can read a general background of Iraq's history; its production and consumption of oil, natural gas, and electricity; and a country and economic overview. Maps and graphs help illustrate the location and availability of the resources and the overviews and links provide additional well organized information that's quite interesting to read. [JAB]
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How Far is It?
http://www.indo.com/distance/
Indo.com describes itself as the leading Internet travel and technology company based in Indonesia. The Web site includes a handy and interesting tool called How Far is It? The service uses data from the US Census to find the latitude and longitude of two places and the distance between them. Simply type in a "from" city and a "to" city, and click the Look it Up button to retrieve the distance (as the crow flies), the cities latitude and longitude, links to maps, and any other available information available. Although it's difficult to ignore the requests for booking a flight to Indonesia while browsing the site, the handy and simple tool for finding distances should be found helpful for a variety of uses. [JAB]
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Historical Maps
http://bell.lib.umn.edu/hist/
The James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota provides the Historical Maps page as part of their main Web site. Users can view more than fifty maps online, each of which contain a short description of what the map is depicting. One example is a navigational map of Africa and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans that was designed to illustrate the first Dutch expedition to Java undertaken by Cornelis de Houtman in 1597. The maps can be viewed in fine detail and are quite fascinating to view and learn about. Anyone interested in history, cartography, or other similar subjects should enjoy exploring the collection. [JAB]
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Hubble Site: Index to Animations [QuickTime]
http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanets/meteorites.html
NASA's Hubble Site offers many great resources related to the telescope including the Index to Animations page. Visitors have access to over twenty large file movies and animations that depict such phenomena as a star birth in the Trifid nebula, the rotation of Uranus, a Neptune weather animation, a gamma ray burst, and an animated star chart showing the path of comet Hyakutake, among others. The fascinating visualizations are also linked to informational pages that further explain what is being seen. Although some of the files are quite large, even those with slower modems will find the time waiting well worth it. [JAB]
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Putting Down Roots in Earthquake Country
http://www.scecdc.scec.org/eqcountry.html
Putting Down Roots in Earthquake Country is an informational Web site provided by the Southern California Earthquake Center. Citizens can learn about the San Andreas fault, other California faults, how to build and maintain an earthquake safe house, how to survive an earthquake, how they are measured and what the magnitude means, common earthquake myths, and much more. As a safety and an educational site, this unique resource does a good job of presenting a lot of information, illustrations, and graphics in an easy-to-follow format that helps explain this powerful and potentially deadly natural occurrence. [JAB]
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Images of Historical Earthquakes
http://nisee.berkeley.edu/kozak/
The National Information Service for Earthquake Engineering of the University of California, Berkeley maintains the Images of Historical Earthquakes Web site. The hundreds of illustrations are accessible by an alphabetical table of countries or regions, or by a chronological list beginning in 464 BC and ending in 1932. Each image contains a brief description, a link for more information, and a link to the image itself. The fascinating photographs and other graphics, along with the historical content, make the site a wonderful online resource for anyone interested in history, earthquakes, photography, or related topics. [JAB]
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ReliefWeb Map Centre
http://www.reliefweb.int/w/map.nsf/home
As a project of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, ReliefWeb has a mandate to strengthen the response capacity of the humanitarian relief community through the timely dissemination of reliable information on response, preparedness, and disaster prevention. The Map Centre page of the Web site contains links to a wealth of informative maps that carry on the organizations mandate by providing humanitarian content in cartographic form. Some of the maps available include Iraq food storage sites, Argentina flood location map, an overview of Liberian conflict, landslides in Papua New Guinea, and many more. The maps can be browsed by geographic location and subject, or searched by various parameters, making it an easy-to-use and helpful resource for anyone seeking informative maps that can be freely downloaded. [JAB]
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Geomorphology from Space: A Global Overview of Regional Landforms
http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/DAAC_DOCS/geomorphology/GEO_HOME_PAGE.html
Geomorphology from Space: A Global Overview of Regional Landforms contains a gallery of 237 space images of different landforms. Categories include tectonic, volcanic, fluvial, deltaic, coastal, karst/ lakes, eolian, glacial, planetary, mapping, and future outlook. The fascinating pictures can be enlarged by clicking on them and contain commentary, locator maps, and even geologic maps when available. Although a search feature would be helpful, anyone interested in landforms, photography, or just science in general will appreciate the well designed site. [JAB]
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