This year we’ve seen photography competitions for the best sea view and for views a little closer to home. But how about something real close — the winning images from Nikon’s Small World competition.
2019 Photomicrography Competition
The Nikon International Small World Competition first began in 1975 as a means to recognize and applaud the efforts of those involved with photography through the light microscope. Since then, Small World has become a leading showcase for photomicrographers from the widest array of scientific disciplines.
Phantom midge larva (though it reminds me of something else), Christopher Algar:
Neuron growth, Dr Torsten Wittman:
Housefly compound eye pattern, Dr Razvan Cornel Constantin:
Small white hair spider, Javier Rupérez:
OK that’s maybe a little too close. Let’s take a step back. Wayyy back.
These beautiful, swirling images are maps of Washington’s geology
These maps reveal the shapes of the state’s landslides, river basins, and glaciers, along with other strange features, like glacial drumlins and mysterious mima mounds. Lidar data can be used to make maps that highlight elevation contours as well as the aspect and slope of the land. They can reveal landslides hidden by trees and faults beneath the earth’s surface.
So that’s Washington. What about the rest of the globe?
Can we make a 3-D map of the whole world?
Their ultimate goal now is to create a comprehensive archive of lidar scans, including some that are already in existence and more to be added over time, to fuel an immense dataset of the Earth’s surface, in three dimensions. It will have tremendous utility in the short term for finding ancient sites and large-scale patterns, but Fisher and Leisz are taking a long view. With such a tool, they say, when the full impacts of climate change begin to set in, future generations will have a comprehensive understanding of how things once were.
The plan, he says, is to start with the most vulnerable ecological and cultural heritage sites, and go from there. For example, Fisher estimates that the entire Amazon rain forest, where a scourge of forest fires recently made international headlines, could be lidar scanned by plane and helicopter in six years, for $15 million. The next step could be to use some future technology that puts lidar in orbit and makes covering large areas easier.
“Right now we’re not able to put a lidar instrument into the orbit that would give us the kind of resolution we’re requiring,” Fisher says. “Ten years from now, maybe that might not be true. But we can’t wait 10 years.”
I’ve just added a reminder in my Google calendar to come back to this post in ten years’ time, to see how they got on.
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