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Earth Science Technology

Shocking Maps Show How Humans Have Reshaped Earth Since 1992 (vice.com) 88

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: It's no secret that humans -- noisy, messy creatures that we are -- are vastly altering Earth's environments. But it's one thing to know this in the abstract, and another to see global changes laid out in detail, as they are in comprehensive new maps published this month in the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation. Developed by geoscientist Tomasz Stepinski and his team at the University of Cincinnati's Space Informatics Lab (SPI), the intricate visualizations reveal that 22 percent of Earth's total landmass was altered between 1992 and 2015, mostly by humans. The most common change was forest loss due to agricultural development, and the second most common was the reverse -- farms to forests. The swift urbanization of grasslands, forests, and farms was also reflected in the maps.

Stepinski and his colleagues used satellite data collected by the European Space Agency's Climate Change Initiative, which included geospatial maps of land cover designed to monitor climate change. The team broke these maps into 81-kilometer-squared tracts and created a legend of color-coded tiles based on nine broad types of transitions that occurred between 1992 and 2015 (agriculture gains in yellow, forest losses in maroon, etc). The tiles are shaded to reflect the degree of change, with the lightest shade corresponding to regions altered by less than 10 percent, and dark patches representing regions that shifted by 30 percent or more. On a broad scale, the maps emphasize the massive influence of human activity on the planet. But the project has also revealed granular details about specific locations.

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Shocking Maps Show How Humans Have Reshaped Earth Since 1992

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  • Shocking Maps (Score:2, Insightful)

    by mentil ( 1748130 )

    The team broke these maps into 81-kilometer-squared tracts

    Being paid to stare at huge tracts of land all day? Where can I sign up?!

    • by Anonymous Coward

      >> The team broke these maps into 81-kilometer-squared tracts

      >_ Being paid to stare at huge tracts of land all day? Where can I sign up?!

      And everybody will doubt you. They'll say it's a hoax. It's there, visible on screen and on paper, but even so they'll say it's a lie.

      Do you still want it? The problem is not becoming a clown, the issue is you will be seeing everyday a catastrophe in the making and no one will even want to take any action. The frustration will be deadly.

      https://xkcd.com/331/

  • "Name one ecosystem that is better off for having agriculture moved into it?" Toby Hemenway http://bit.ly/1pnapoW [bit.ly]

    "The middle east today is what annual ag does." @RestorationAgD http://bit.ly/1K3otw2 [bit.ly]

    • Depends on the agriculture.

      There's no evidence of any significant environmental impact from agriculture specifically until about 3,500 BC.

      So it's not agriculture, it's scale and density. Small scale, low density agriculture won't alter the soil, the albedo or the local climate.

      The question is, what can you scale these up to?

  • Show how earth people have been hyping stories since they sat around the cave fire.

    • by mentil ( 1748130 )

      *found on a cave wall*
      Start a cookfire with this one weird trick!
      How did Og make such a sharp knife? Hunters hate him!

    • It's not shocking, but the maps are really cool. Something that surprised me about the maps is how much forest area has increased over that time. I didn't expect that.
      • Why didnt you expect it? North America has a lot more forest than it did 100 years ago. This is a well known fact you surely have heard before (although maybe you dismissed it, unintelligently, because maybe thats what you do?)
        • Why didn't you expect it? North America has a lot more forest than it did 100 years ago.

          Look at the maps, notice the location of a lot of the new forests. Sure, I expect new trees in green states like California, or on the edge of farmland like the great Lakes, but the quantity and location is rather surprising.

      • The stark disappearance of the Aral Sea, due to disruptions of its tributaries by irrigation projects, shows up as a visible blob on the Kazakh-Uzbek border.

        Or, if you're airborne and the flight map tells you you're over it, you can look down and see the big patch of dark dirt where it used to be.

        It was one of the most profoundly depressing experiences of my life.

  • Has anyone bothered to determine the shift of the albedo of the Earth according to these changes? If more energy from the Sun is retained by the Earth and not reflected away due to humans changing the surface of the Earth, such changes could be a major source of global warming.
  • Jaw dropping?

    Click-bait much?

  • Just to put that into a more meaningful number 75% of the surface being water and only 25% landmass

  • 22 percent of Earth's total landmass was altered between 1992 and 2015

    Given that in 1992 the world's population was 5.5 billion and in 2015 it was 7.38 billion, that is an increase of 34%.

    The article tells us that the second largest change was reverting farmland back to forests, so not all "change" was detrimental. Even if 22% of the land was altered, for a 34% increase in population, that isn't as bad as it sounds. Even taking into account that a lot of that land is so remote or desolate as to be unusable.

  • by quenda ( 644621 ) on Saturday December 01, 2018 @02:04AM (#57730586)

    This puts us ahead of the Elephants, who turned mere millions of square km of jungle into grassland.
    But still well behind the cyanobacteria in changing the planet and causing mass extinction.

  • Is the 22% where any change has occurred, regardless how extreme? This number may be misleading given that they are breaking the map into chunks. If each chunk had only 10% alteration the total change would only be 2.2%. I understand that is a outlandish number I am only using it to illustrate my question. I do not have access to the full article to check myself.
  • Shocking, just shocking !!! Shocking I tell you.

    Is that title now the anti-attention grabber on tech websites. I don't care how real the article may be, but I'm not going to read it simply because the title turns me off.

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