Beneath the deeply-shaded underbelly of an elevated section of Seattle’s I-5 freeway, Colonnade Bike Park tumbles freely downhill across steep and jumbled terrain, occupying formerly barren and listless ground. Ramps, berms, drops, and various homespun earth-retaining systems slip between the industrial cathedral’s neatly-spaced namesake concrete pilings, aggregating into roughly pixelated surfaces, which in turn form a series of circuits for the local mountain biking community that designed, built, maintains, and rides in the park.

Like the tricks pulled by the bikers careening across its wood, concrete and earth, the park feels improvised. Much of the material to build it was donated or recycled from demolition projects around the city. Sandstone pavers torn out of cobblestone streets that linked the neighborhoods east and west of the park before the freeway viaduct split them were donated by the Seattle Historical Society. Antique Douglas Fir joists and framing were donated from a renovation project a local mountain biker was working on. A logger friend supplies the Park with a steady supply of “mill reject cedar logs”, logs which are too large, too small, or too deformed to meet the standards of commercial cedar processing. Scraps — pressure-treated lumber, fasteners, and other materials discarded on local construction projects — are brought to the Park and recycled into tracks, jumps, drops, and wall rides. Ordinary off-the-shelf items have been retooled, like the permeable concrete waffle pavers that have been converted into ad-hoc cellular confinement systems.

The accumulated effect of this process of ceaseless improvisation — the Park’s two acres took roughly four years to construct and design is ever ongoing– is a distinctively raw aesthetic. Like many contemporary urban parks, including New York’s (over-)celebrated High Line, Colonnade Park draws much of its aesthetic appeal from the character of the industrial infrastructure it shares space with. Yet rather than introducing crisp contemporary minimalism to contrast with that infrastructure, as many of its more famous contemporaries do, the decisively functional arrangement of the Park’s angled planes of waffle pavers and bermed piles of recycled dirt amplifies the raw instrumentality of the viaduct above.

But, as appealing as it is, the lo-fi aesthetic of these pragmatic and hand-made constructions is not the most important lesson of the Park. What Colonnade Park suggests is a re-orientation of the practice of landscape architecture away from faceless capital and towards creative and vested labor; away from design elitism and towards the participation of the users of a landscape in its construction; and away from standardization and mechanization towards difference, variability and the instantiated volition of the individual laborer.

Public urban landscapes — parks, plazas, squares — are often referred to as “capital projects” by those who build them — politicians, developers, architects, construction firms, planners, contractors, and so on. The use of that particular term recognizes the central mobilizing and productive role of capital in their construction. When capital plays this primary role, the quality of a landscape is understood to be determined in large part by the quantity of capital that can be devoted to it: to “upgrade” a plaza is to replace cheap concrete and unit pavers with expensive stone, wood, and metals; to spend more money is to improve. At the same time, to hold down costs for the production and installation of materials, standardization is essential, and where difference is introduced — in the algorithmic variations common to parametric design, for instance — it is introduced most often at the production stage, where capital is most easily applied.

Colonnade Park presents an alternative.  The Park was built with relatively minimal funding, using refurbished materials. But because of the massive quantity of skilled volunteer labor available, those materials have been fitted together in almost endlessly variegated combinations. As the volunteers who built the park are mountain bikers who wanted to ride in it, the Park is deeply customized to the spatial practices situated within it. Thus the shift from a capital-intensive landscape architecture to a labor-intensive landscape architecture is enabled by the presence of an interested and knowledgeable community which is willing and able to labor in a landscape voluntarily and without pay, for the rewards contained within and produced by that act of labor. This is a different kind of labor, and it heralds new possibilities for landscape design.

To understand these possibilities, it may be helpful to think briefly about the intertwined history of labor and landscape. Perhaps more than other forms of design, labor and landscape are co-generators of one another.  Human behaviors and landscape processes feedback on one another, as the literal liveliness of the materials used to construct landscapes — most obviously, plants, but also animals, fungi, bacteria, insects, and even inanimate substances like sediments, soils, and water which nonetheless possess aggregate behaviors — requires that constructed landscapes are continuously maintained and always evolving, in a struggle between growth and entropy, which are not always easily distinguished. This process of continuous maintenance is not necessarily capital intensive, but it is typically labor intensive. Think of the difference between the process of weeding a garden by hand and maintaining a strip mall planting buffer with weed-whackers and leaf blowers; think of the delicacy and intricacy of the former landscape, and the bluntness of the latter.

Viewed from a historical perspective, the contemporary capital project, with its emphasis on the agency of capital over labor, is an aberration. From the construction of pyramids in Egypt and Mesoamerica, to Roman villas and Qing dynasty gardens, to Bramante and Ligono in the Italian Renaissance, or even Humphrey Repton and Capability Brown in Romantic England, the practice of both monumental and ornamental landscape modification was long defined by a reliance on the mobilization of vast quantities of (often subjugated) human labor quarrying stone, pruning trees, excavating earth. At even broader spatial and temporal scales, the aggregate effects of persistent labor have historically produced some of our earliest and largest geo-biological impacts: terrace cultivation on hillsides in China and the Andes, the pre-Columbian transformation of North American biomes through the persistent annual application of fire, the co-evolved hedgerow ecologies of Western European farmland, and even, as recent archaeological evidence suggests, the fertile, anthropogenically-induced “terra preta” soils of the Amazon.

[Piccolomini Gardens, via Wikimedia.]

Perhaps the most extravagant examples of labor-based landscape modification are the incredibly maintenance-intensive geometries of Baroque gardens, most prominently found in France and Italy. Intended to realize a peculiar set of ideas about the relationship between symmetry, geometry, and the proper ordering and control of both the physical and moral universes that were endemic to that time and place, the Baroque gardens employed armies of skilled and semi-skilled landscape laborers in long struggles against the unruly entropic tendencies of boxwoods and poplars that were constantly trying to escape their confinement into crisply rectilinear parterres, bosquets, and allees. But setting aside the specific philosophical motivations of these gardeners, though, it is not difficult to imagine an alternative Baroque — perhaps we will call it the Ecological Baroque, or the Performative Baroque — equally extravagant in its application of labor to the transformation of landscape, yet aimed towards the realization of an entirely different set of ends: the enhancement and growth of ecological productivity.

[How a "sustainable site" is constructed; source]

[Community planting on a dredge island in the Chesapeake Bay; source]

To envision this Performative Baroque, imagine swarms of volunteer gardeners, acting in concert to re-make the floral composition of an urban landscape. Harvesting one set of urban voids for fast-growing grasses and perennials whose biomass can be converted into fuel. Seeding roadbanks and railways with erosion-halting vegetation. Setting up watches over cryptoforests and freakologies to record patterns of interaction between fauna and flora, and then establishing botanical kill lists of species to be removed for their lack of utility, while encouraging others that host a particular insect species which is struggling. Instead of trucking in groves of “native” trees and burying elaborate irrigation prostheses to support them, as a capital-intensive landscape architecture does, these landscapers would curate the slow successional evolution of new forests on abandoned lots, terrain vague, and infrastructural leftovers. The city would be their garden.

This picture reveals a critical difference between the historical pattern of landscapes produced by an extravagance of labor and a future turn back towards labor, a crucial difference between the hands that carved the Baroque gardens of Vaux le Vicomte out of resistant plants and the mountain bikers who hammered together Colonnade Park. That difference is that the historical pattern is of involuntary labor — at best, wage labor, performed at the behest of a benefactor able to afford wages in the pursuit of some vision — but a future turn towards labor will hinge on voluntary volition. If there is to be an Ecological Baroque, it will be built by willing hands.

What would motivate hosts of volunteers? Why would they lend their time and talents to such collective efforts? If we return to Colonnade Park, we find the coming together of key components that were integral to making the Park a physical reality. First — and perhaps most importantly — someone had to recognize the latent potential of those couple of abandoned acres beneath I-5. In this case, that someone was a local bike shop owner, Simon Lawton, who was already riding his bike under the viaduct. Lawton’s rides convinced him that the site was perfect for a bike park. The freeway above sheltered it from Seattle’s persistent winter rains.  The irregular but steep topography was well-suited to the introduction of circuit tracks without requiring extensive artificial grading, and, in its then-state of abandonment, the shadowed space was considered a safety hazard by the future park’s neighbors. Lawton took this vision to a series of local organizations and constituencies, including Seattle City Parks and Recreation, a local neighborhood council, Urban Sparks (a non-profit group specializing in kickstarting urban community projects), and, crucially, the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance, Seattle’s largest mountain biking advocacy and trail maintenance organization. Once each of those organizations had been convinced that a bike park could and should be built beneath I-5, it was the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance that mobilized networks of resources — like the streams of surplus construction materials that were fashioned into the physical infrastructure of the bike park and communities of volunteers to construct it. Lawton’s creative opportunism provided the spark, and the presence of constituency that bought into that original creative vision generated a pool of labor that was both invested in the maturation of the vision and capable of pursuing the vision with a great deal of individual creativity. That is, the bikers wanted to ride in the future park themselves and as experienced bikers, the volunteers possessed an innate and specific understanding of the physical geometry of the future uses of the park.

Neither of these things are true of the labor employed on the typical capital project. Like most labor in the Post-Fordist economy, the labor employed on capital projects is specialized, corporatized, homogeneous, and standardized; it is fundamentally ill-suited to craft, at once inimical to difference through standardization and resistant to holistic understanding because of the specialization demanded for economic efficiency.

Freed from the constraints imposed by the dominance of capital, the pooled labor of groups of people defined by shared spatial proclivities — not just mountain bikers, but also skateboarders, soccer players, drag racers, parkour traceurs, rock climbers and boulderers, paintballers, and bird watchers — could begin to generate urban public landscapes which are more idiosyncratic and more differentiated than the public parks of the twentieth century. Similarly, the labor of knowledgeable and motivated ecological hobbyists could transform gardening from an individualistic and primarily ornamental practice into a communal effort, cultivating whole and diversified cities. Labor, which like the volunteer labor that built Colonnade Park, is uniquely motivated, local, and capable of imbuing its work with creative intent, falls outside the typical boundaries of landscape architecture as ‘professionally practiced’. And as these vested pools of labor fuse user, designer and builder they are more invested and broadly knowledgeable of its future use and how it will be occupied than the wage laborers of capital projects, opening diverse realms of possibility for the design of urban landscapes.

The photos in this post are, unless otherwise specified, taken by Brett Milligan. The photos which are by Brett and not of Colonnade Park are from the Goats on Belmont project, which took advantage of a bit of non-human labor to cultivate change. This post is cross-posted at mammoth. The account of the construction of Colonnade Park that this piece is based on was pieced together from interviews that Brett conducted with Glenn Glover and Mike Westra of the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance.

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Updates, writeups and reviews of the series will be hosted at Brian Davis’ Landscape Archipelago

Bracket 2, soon to be published by ACTAR, “examines physical and virtual soft systems, as they pertain to infrastructure, ecologies, landscapes, environments, and networks. In an era of declared crises—economic, ecological and climatic, amongst others—the notion of soft systems has gained increasing traction as a counterpoint to permanent, static and hard systems. Acknowledging fluid and indeterminate situations with complex feedback loops that allow for reaction and adaptation, the possibility of soft systems has re-entered the domain of design. Bracket 2 critically positions and defines soft systems through 27 projects and 12 articles. From soft politics, soft power and soft spaces to fluid territories, software and soft programming, Bracket 2 unpacks the use and role of responsive, indeterminate, flexible, and immaterial systems in design.”

A preview of all the wickedly-good contributions to Bracket [Goes Soft] is available at the project’s site.  Dredge, a chapter co-authored by myself, Rob Holmes and Stephen Becker of Mammoth and Tim Maly (Quiet Babylon), situates dredging processes within the whole-scale redesign of earth’s hydrologic and geologic cycles.  We allude to these assemblies of silts, sands, turbidity curtains, cutter head suction dredgers, water policies, flow models and silt fences via an organizing device we call the dredge cycle.  By ‘soft’ systems we mean both the fluid materiality of sediments combined with the evolving strategies and operations that are deployed to manipulate them.  We document systems of erosion control, soil transformations, sensate masses of earth, and the coupling of natural, economic, military and civilian forces.  In speculating on the relations of these things, the essay articulates salient characteristics of these systemics, including responsiveness, embedded intelligence, self-organization and the Sisyphean tendencies driving the cycle’s ever-expanding agency.

On December 4th, editors Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth of Smudge Studio are launching Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life, published by punctum books:

“Making the Geologic Now announces shifts in cultural sensibilities and practices. It offers early sightings of an increasingly widespread turn toward the geologic as source of explanation, motivation, and inspiration for creative responses to material conditions of the present moment. In the spirit of a broadside, this edited collection circulates images and short essays from over 40 artists, designers, architects, scholars, and journalists who are extending our active awareness of inhabitation out to the cosmos and down to the Earth’s iron core. Their works are offered as test sites for what might become thinkable and possible if humans were to take up the geologic as our instructive co-designer—as a partner in designing thoughts, things, systems, and experiences. As a reading and viewing event, Making the Geologic Now is designed to move with its audiences while delivering signals from unfolding edges of the “geologic now.”

The launch consists of a release party at Studio-X NYC and the release of an interactive web version of the book.  You can also download a free PDF version, as well as order bound and printed copies of the richly illustrated book.  Visit the link to punctum books above for more details and for a list of the 40+ contributors.

I’m excited and thankful to be a part of this project and have contributed two essays. “Packaging Sand and Silt“, authored by the Dredge Research Collaborative, explores the Geotube – the 21st century sand bag – as a material point of entry into the ever-aggregating set of anthro-geological processes we call the dredge cycle.  As we claim, “Geotubes embody a new vernacular of engineered geology, of infrastructures for the self-aware Anthropocene. They surprise and captivate us, just as elevated freeway interchanges and massive dams captured the cultural imagination of the last century. They are a harbinger of things to come.”

[Mine tailing reclamation at the Tyrone Copper Mine, southern New Mexico]

The second essay I’ve contributed, “Space-Time Vertigo“, is an anthro-cartographic study of the reshaping of more than five contiguous miles of the continental divide in Southern New Mexico, as engendered by the earthworks of an open-pit copper mine.  Sifting through photographs, outdated geologic surveys and in-the-field experiences, we co-encounter this overlooked landmark where a novel watershed has been detonated into the topographic seam of the continent.

As Making the Geologic Now editors Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth state:

“A new cultural sensibility is emerging. As we struggle to understand and meet new material realities of earth and life on earth, it becomes increasingly obvious that the geologic is not just about rocks. We now cohabit with the geologic in unprecedented ways, in teeming assemblages of exchange and interaction among geologic materials and forces and the bio, cosmo, socio, political, legal, economic, strategic, and imaginary. As a reading and viewing experience, Making the Geologic Now is designed to move through culture, sounding an alert from the unfolding edge of the “geologic turn” that is now propagating through contemporary ideas and practices.”

Looking forward to the discussions that we hope this project will generate.

GROUND UP is a new journal produced by the Dept. of Landscape Architecture at U.C. Berkeley.  Similar to other student-run design journals, such as Kerb and Scapegoat, GROUND UP offers a snap shot of the kinds of things people are processing, refractively, between academia and practice, as told through student’s curatorial agency.  GROUND UP’s first issue, Landscapes of Uncertainty, “highlights temporary landscape installations, explores the possibilities of remnant spaces, and elucidates the impact of shifting political, environmental, and social forces on design.”  Amongst other essays and contributions, the interview with David Fletcher (principal of Fletcher Studio) and Marcel Wilson (principal of Bionic) gives a taste of the issue’s memorable moments:

“DV: I don’t mean to be Jens Jenson about this, but there’s something wrong with the fact that we are making landscapes that require life support systems. So the political point is in the role of contemporary landscape architects in shifting world views and in shifting societal desires…what we try to do is be a little polemic – the Beta Bridge Project [image above] was about that.  There we were trying to suggest alternatives to what they are trying to do it terms of structural monitoring; to suggest a marijuana farm and a data farm living in symbiosis, and how that might generate revenue to create public benefits elsewhere in California…

MW: You could say this about the academy, and I think you could say this about practice: its way too self-referential, and way too concerned with what has been done. Only looking within a relatively narrow set of answers and professional views of the world, do you begin to understand that things are just more complex.  Academia is largely consumed with repeating things…

DF: Landscape Architecture has removed itself from something that is already removed.  You hear: ‘we need to move beyond the [hu]man-nature divide’…’we need to make the city and nature come together.’  You don’t realize that the people who are actually doing research on those issues, the geographers, the ecologist, all these other people have moved beyond that idea a long time ago.  I do think that landscape urbanism – as a discourse or not – is a lucky discourse.  It just happened to hit at this time when all these other little revolutions were emerging, and I think it’s an amazing time to practice.”

GROUND UP is currently scouting for material for its second issue, Grit.  Submission deadline is Jan 4th, 2013).

The map above pinpoints current implementation sites of the Assisted Migration Adaptation Trial for forests.  Specific to trees, assisted migration can be defined as “the purposeful movement of species to facilitate or mimic natural [italics added] population or range expansion to help ensure forest plantations remain resilient in future climates.”   The adaptation trial is extensive: “Some 48 test sites stretch from the Yukon to southern Oregon, with nine in the United States and the rest in Canada.”  The predicted rate of climate change is rapid enough that foresters – a breed of farmers producing crops that take decades to nearly a century to yield, are anticipating that they need to sow for conditions that don’t yet exist where they are:  “Foresters are no longer planting just for today’s climate…they’re planting for the climate 60 to 80 years from now that is expected to be three to four degrees warmer.”

Enveloped in the hyperobject (or hyperbody) of climate change, all forests appear to be traversing accelerated trajectories of change, never mind the thick background of miscellaneous anthro-aggregated factors, like fire suppression, urbanization and a global reordering of species that has already happened.  Those torturous native vs. exotic debates become further aggravated or go right out the window in these scenarios (or rather natives slip out the back door and become requisite migrants).  And while scientists and technical experts are boxing through the theoretical entropy of these novel co-evolutions, citizens and grass-roots organizations are coming out of the woodwork (apologies) and asserting their own do-it-yourself agency in willfully migrating landscapes:

[Guerrilla gardening meets climate change adaptation in a nurtured field of Torreya taxifolia seedlings in the highlands of North Carolina, cared for by the Torreya Guardians]

Early this year, the USDA updated its plant hardiness maps to reflect changes in climate (the new map is generally one 5-degree Fahrenheit half-zone warmer than the 1990 version throughout much of the United States). We assume this also implies that the USDA’s Forest Service manages many more than 80 experimental forests.

(Of related interest: “First the Forest” exhibition at CCA, curated by Dan Handel:  “Reframing forestry as an activity that creates highly designed environments with unprecedented scale, ambition and precision, the exhibition proposes an expanded understanding of the connections between natural resources, production processes, and designed form.”)

Saturated by images of inundated New York – via the instagram storm and elsewhere – we wonder how the city’s subways and various other low-lying crevices will be drained of Sandy’s remnant flood waters and how long that process might take.  As it turns out, there is an emerging design specialty just for that purpose being pioneered by the U.S. Army Corps’ National Unwatering SWAT Team.

From gleaning current headlines we’ve learned that members of the unwatering team are currently in NY to advise and assist other agencies in removing copious amounts of the metropolis’ unwanted water.  This is the team’s first deployment outside of Louisiana, where it acquired its unique skill set.  As explained by The USACE, the SWAT team was first assembled and deployed in New Orleans to manage the flooded aftermath of Katrina.

In terms of applicable qualifications, the ad hoc team is made up of “civilian professionals with expertise in civil, electrical, mechanical and hydraulic engineering; contracting; emergency management, public affairs and other specialties.”  When they go into these situations, NPR quoted that “‘What they typically do is look at engineering drawings to look at the natural low points and what the natural drainage may be, and how long it will take to drain…They then look for areas to breach, figure out what size of pumps to use for the water, and begin the process of removing the water.‘”

In the field equipment consists of “trailer-mounted trash pumps with discharge pipes 8 to 16 inches in diameter” and “engine-driven self-priming pumps that can pass water and even golf ball-sized debris  …if the task is too big, they can resort to less mobile pumps with discharge pipes ranging from 16 to 40 inches. The size of the pump depends on the scale of the problem” (via the Atlantic Wire).   As unique urban dredging project, once the water is pumped out of where it isn’t supposed to be, overland routes must then be charted to convey that water and miscellaneous detritus through lengths of pipe back into the NY/NJ harbor.  Challenging work.

As part of that effort, is the tactical SWAT team keeping records of their unique and purposeful interactions with these flood waters?  As they observe the flow and pooling of water in Manhattan and harder hit outer boroughs, those labyrinthian topographies of twisted planes of asphalt and concrete, imperfect cracks, sewer openings, stairwells, etc., do they have the opportunity to document ‘post occupancy’ evaluations; meaning are they noting where water congregated (and where it didn’t), how the water got there and the path they used to direct it back out?  Do they retain all those civil engineering drawings and sewer diagrams that they decoded and tactically breached?

We ask as the current work of the unwatering team and associated agencies, if well documented, presents an opportunity to retrofit the semi-aqueous edges of the city, tailored exactly to what it physically is now.  Not to speak flippantly of the disaster and hardship this has been for the metropolis and elsewhere, nor to overlook that Sandy could be an exceptional 200-500 yr storm event.  The intent is quote the opposite.  We know the city’s edges were underwater prior to being filled in, and all contemporary climate trajectories indicate that they are going to go back underwater more often.  So in conjunction with looking at redesigning the NY/NJ coastline outward with hard or soft infrastructure, how could we intentionally integrate water flux into the city informed by spatially explicit data and intimacy of its edge’s fabric?   As a start, perhaps the city could extend the deadline on its current Change the Course of Waterfront Construction competition to get their money’s worth.  Alter the brief to make all participants respond to updated FEMA flood maps, disaster struck areas and forensic findings of the unwatering SWAT team.  And rather than just the waterfront as single string of urban blocks closest to shoreline, teams would be required to examine the metropolis’s gradient of edge zones and how water circulates within them; 21st century acqua alta city. a far less speculative Rising Currents, 2.0.

[World Magnetic Model maps notating the magnetic field's intensity (top) and inclination lines, or angle of the earth's magnetic field above or below horizontal (bottom)]

[Film of a suspension of dissociated cells from trout "olfactory epithelium" (cells extracted from some unfortunate trout's nose) placed under the laboratory influence of a magnetic field rotating at a frequency of 0.33 Hz.  We can see the iron-laden epithelium cell (near the center), rotating in tandem with the magnetic field.  Through this procedure, scientists postulate that they have isolated magnetoreceptor cells that respond to the Earth’s magnetic field.  Equipped with this sensorial compass, migratory fish may be able to feel which way is north, as well as detect small differences in magnetic field strength to navigate along global lines of inclination.]

Typically when we speak of migration, we think of monarch butterflies, people, snow geese or Chinook salmon; organisms that move from one landscape on the quest for food, procreation, bodily protection, or something else.  The emphasis falls on the movement through time from one physical place to another for what is sought somewhere else.  We rarely, if ever, talk about the migration of landscapes themselves, meaning the manner in which landscapes are also bodies shifting through time, in turn influencing the migration of those smaller things.

The trout compass (assuming the above study’s general validity) caught my attention as a potential illustration (perhaps an esoteric one) of those relationships.  Trout have these peculiar concentrations of iron in their noses that allow them to sense a global material phenomena.  The differentiated cells aberrantly push at the rest of its body to tell it which direction to go across vast expanses of aqueous geography.  Like switching on a GPS receiver for the first time, the fish doesn’t ‘know’ or register that it has this technology within it – its highly attuned and place-specific historical artifacts of being.  It’s cells auto-form seemingly involuntary scale-jumping relationships to an assemblage of forces much larger than itself that it comes to fully depend on.  With that hardware organically calibrated near conception, it doesn’t seem to require re-tuning or adjustment.

The same isn’t true for the world magnetic model maps pictured above.  Used nearly universally by both military and private institutions, the models must be redrawn every five years (the current model was completed in 2010 and will be revised in 2014) to keep up with how the earth’s magnetic field migrates:

["The famous English astronomer Edmund Halley (after whom Halley’s Comet is named) was the first person to map how compass direction varied over the globe (declination). He published the first chart of compass variations in 1701 (above), after two expeditions around the Atlantic making accurate measurements of the magnetic field." *]

Three centuries after Halley few of us (humans) still navigate with a magnetic compass, as we’ve more or less abandoned the earth’s magnetism as base material for way-finding systems.  Rather its been supplanted by a far more extensively designed infrastructure embedded on the earth’s surface and outer atmosphere.  As seen in the rapid evolution in how iPhones know where one is (the link is already out of date), the extent of the locational field first grew ever larger, then the grain of the weave grows tighter and tighter  – from trilateration of constellations of satellites orbiting at altitudes of 12,000 miles to trilateration of wifi-bubbles.  And rather than tracking that which is wholly non-anthropogenic – forces emanating from the earth’s outer core – our external-to-body compass tracks feedback from all the extensive appendages and alterations we’ve made to given surfaces.  The compass reads as artifact of landscape change.

[a stereoscopic terrain map of Mars, prepared by the USGS.  "Use red-blue glasses (red lens over left eye) to view this three-dimensional image of a canyon eroded into strata, interpreted as sulfate beds on the flanks of Aeolis Mons in Gale crater."]

In order to chart a feasible path for the wanderings of the Curiosity Rover, the USGS is using a set of high-resolution digital topographic maps prepared by its geophysicists.  In determining where Curiosity will roam, a close reading of the lay of the land is required:

“The ideal site must not only contain features of scientific interest but must also have terrain in which the rover can safely land and drive. How rough is the surface? How steep are the slopes? Are there reasonable routes the rover can traverse to reach the scientific targets? Topographic maps, which show not just features’ positions but also their elevations, are needed to answer such questions.”

Details of the USGS’s 1-meter resolution (!) digital topographic models are available here.

[Section and model rendering of the pv150 PowerBuoy, by Ocean Power Technologies]

The U.S.’s first federally approved commercial wave energy infrastructure is readying for deployment off the coast of Oregon.  In an ocean array 2 miles from shore, each energy producing buoy will measure 150 feet tall by 40 feet wide, and weigh 200 tons:

As interesting as the bobbing devices themselves is the interactive Google Earth marine zoning map used to help decide where the 30 acre array was to be sited.  If you go there, you can trace the paths of the undersea telecommunication cables,  commercial shipping lanes, dredge spoil sites, see the ocean floor contours and their habitat classifications, review Oregon’s territorial sea plans, and take note of where all the optimal fishing grounds are (fishermen reluctantly revealed their favored fishing locations in the hopes of preserving them).  I’ve never seen a more comprehensive mapping of the Oregon coast, nor a map that demonstrates just how intricately claimed the ocean territory is.