You can peel The Virtual Earth off your browser and modify it to your own requirements. This is to enable people to modify and maintain their own versions of the Virtual Earth. This will result in many variants of the Virtual Earth, but you can click here to obtain the latest version of the original page.
The Virtual Earth is General Information
The World Wide Web is an initiative by the CERN organisation for a global information retrieval system. If you know very little about the Internet, then The Big Dummies Guide to the Internet is a good start, although there is a lot to read.
If you know nothing about the Web, then the on-line article by Hughes, Entering the World Wide Web or the article by Torkington, The WWW Primer, are good starting points. The USGS has Training Material on the WWW and Mosaic, plus an Internet Resources Page. Telstra Corporation in Australia provides some on-line documents on Internet Guides and Papers on the Internet and the Web. Another good site for Internet Information is the Self Guided Tour of the Internet at the University of Houston.
For more specific information on the Web you should read the FAQ for WWW. As Web connections are based on Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), and URLs are becoming a standard way of refering to connections on the Internet, then browsing Tim Berners-Lee's article Uniform Resource Locators may be a good idea.
General and time-wasting information abound on the Web. Included are
Geology and the Magic
Eight Ball where you can put a question to the Magic 8, CrossRoad CrossWords, none
of which are geologically orientated, Geology quotes,
Dave Carvell's page,
the
Fish Photos, to get realtime pictures of a fish in a tank, Mike Mueller's Home on Westworld where
you canreload a new display of the KNBC Seismograph every 5 minutes, and
finally, the Talk.Origins
archive.
Company Sites
Various White and Yellow Pages are appearing on the net which can give telephone numbers and addresses of people and companies. One worth looking at, especially if you live in the States, is Big Book. This claims to have over 11 million US businesses in its data base, and has configurable search parameters. It can also present you with a location street map and (if one exists) a home page of the company.
Some of the 'biggies' in the computing industry are running Web servers. These include Digital Corporation, Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, Cray Research, IBM, Intel, Novell Corpration, Microsoft and Apple Computers.
Commercial organisations are establishing web servers for both general information to the intenet community and to display their products. Some of the better sites include Info-Mine the Canadian based company Robertson Info-Data Inc. which provides mining information including company and property information, mining publications, a Kimberlite data-base, broker's research reports and more. MineNet by Tensor Technology is aimed at the mining industry but is more on the technical side. It also includes white pages of people interested in mining information on the net. The Northern Miner is a weekly magazine giving exploration results, onsite reports, company profiles and the like in the North American Mining Industry. It also has a mining industry data base with over 2800 entries.
The Investor Channel provides references to investments in the mining industry.
ImageNet by Core Software Technology is a geospatial data site which has an on-line archive and preview system for geospatial data. DeLorme Maps is more than a cartographic company producing top quality maps. Kovach Computing Services is a small company specialising in Dos/Windows statistical software, but it has a good list of sites for shareware and public domain software for the Earth Sciences.
John Harrop's The Geo Exchange is an annotated list of Applied and Commercial Geosciences sites.
The GIS World magazine also has a Web server.
Several GIS Software companies have web sites, or other sites carry
information regarding their software. Included are MapInfo on the internet,
another MapInfo site, which
has a MapInfo FAQ and mailing list information, ESRI GIS site and Issue Dynamics Inc..
Michael Scott
of the University of South Carolina has created a page of
The Fossil Company markets
mineral and fossil specimens and their catalogue has been placed on their
web page. Also located there is an excellent list of geology links, a
Picture Gallery
of Fossils and finally Information on UK Geology.
Geoscience Ltd is a UK company
specialising in deep geotechnical services for the petroleum industry.
A Commercial environmental site worth looking at is INTERA Inc. which has
links to related sites, a Software Index and links to publica domain
software. Another site is
Environmental Hydrosystems, a water resources and environmental
consulting firm which offers a lot on the Net, including a Hot List
of environmental, water resources and Earth Science links, plus the
EnviroMod
Data Warehouse Broker, to search all known pertinent sites
to groundwater and environmental modelling.
Magazine style pages listing what's new on the Net are present. The most
useful of these is The Scout
Report, a weekly publication of Net Scout Services and is provided
by InterNIC. You can access the current issue, or
browse the archive
of previous issues, or search the
archives/
Other on-line magazines for gaining information
do not appear to be updating their information. These include
Internaut
and Matilda in
Cyberspace, a what's new on the Web in Australia, and
WebNews by the
University of Alabama at Birmingham which attempted to archive
and catagorise announcements of new web sites, services and software
gleaned from various Usenet News Groups.
Samizdat Press
aims for the free distribution of Geophysical publications, books
and software.
The On-Line Resources for Earth Scientists (ORES) by Bill Thoen and
Ted Smith has many links to on-line journals and periodicals for various
fields. Included are (Note that some of these pages may not yet be posted):
Geography and
GIS, General
Geology,
Volcanology,
Geophysics and
Oceanography.
Jorg Schulz-Rojahn has a FAQ on Earth Science Journals.
Jorg's interest is in softrock and petroleum geology and this list reflects
that interest.
The Geography Dept. at the University of South Carolina is the www home of the
Disaster Research Newsletter from the Natural Hazards Research and
Applications Center in Boulder, CO.
The American Geological Institute has information on Silverplatter's GeoRef
CD Rom data base, but they also produce the GeoRef Newsletter. Their
gopher sever has the contents and information on the Geotimes Magazine.
The
Hyperspectrum Newsletter covers imaging spectroscopy for remote
sensing, environmental monitoring, photobiology and military target
detection applications.
UserNet is the
technical newsletter from Landmark Graphic Corporation, a supplier of
exploration and production info-systems for the Petroleum Industry. Its
worth a look.
Science Magazine now
produces an Internet edition, as does the Journal of Biological Chemistry
The Historical Gazette is edited
by Bridget Smith. It is a local on-line historical magazine for Oregon
region, but is included here as there are great descriptions of the old
gold mining camps, gold mines (such as the Great Comstock Lode) and reports
from early USGS geologists like Waldemar Lindgren.
Two sites that Web explorers should be familiar with are the
Starting Points document by NCSA, and the
List of Servers at CERN. Another good site is the NCSA Demo Web Document which
demostrates the potential of both the Web and Mosaic as a Web browser.
Most people first gain Web information for particular subjects from the
various Usenet news postings. The early Usent news were archived on
ftp and gopher servers, for example the following usenet items are done with
gopher connections.
sci.geo.geology solid earth sciences,
sci.geo.oceanography, for oceanography, and
sci.geo.petroleum.
However, most of the modern browsers can now access a Usenet News server
directly, and subscribe and post to News groups. This uses the "news:" URL,
but your browser needs to be configured for this. Some of the news groups
of interest to geoscientists include:
sci.geo.geology, sci.geo.petroleum,
sci.geo.earthquakes, comp.infosystems.gis, and sci.geo.hydrology.
Hypermail
is a Web gateway to Usenet News Groups by EIT.
Frequently Asked Questions for a particular news group are a good
source of information. FAQs that have been approved by the *.answers
moderators get archived at the RTFM server at MIT. The main ones for
geosciences include
Geoscience Resources Part 1 and
Geoscience Resources Part 2 by Ingram,
Petroleum Resources by Guthery, Science Data
Formats by Stern, and the Stern's Meteorology FAQ in several parts:
FAQ-Intro,
Weather-Data,
Research-Data,
CD Roms,
Net-resources,
Print-Resources
and State-Climatologists,
and (another in a number of parts)
Satellite Imagery FAQ (part 1),
Satellite Imagery FAQ (part 2),
Satellite Imagery FAQ (part 3),
Satellite Imagery FAQ (part 4), and
Satellite Imagery FAQ (part 5) by Nick Kew.
Some sites access these FAQ archives and automatically convert them to
hypertext documents and add a WAIS search engines. These are WAIS/FAQ
gateways and include the sites at
Ohio State, plus
Universiteit Utrecht, and also
Oxford University
Libraries. The
Geoscience FAQs from Ohio State, and Geosciences FAQs
from Utrecht.
The announcement of new www sites should be posted to the
comp.infosystems.www.announce news group. Hamburg University maintains
HipLink
which provides an up to date hot list style Web page with links to all
the recent announcements of new web sites.
There is a Usenet news group for the
World Wide Web, or
Announcements of new web sites, as well as a
Frequently Asked Questions on the Web.
Various resource guides are becomming 'html-ised'. Bill Thoen's
On-Line Resources for Earth Scientists is available via Cornell
University. Bill, with Ted Smith, are compiling a new on-line version of ORES which is
available at the gisnet server. The GIS and Oceanography sections are
complete, and other sections will be added as they are completed. An
alternate site for a top level link is available.
The paper by McDermott on GIS Sites gives
a list of GIS Resources. Ilana Stern's
Meteorological Resources FAQ is also in hypertext, as is the sci.geo.petroleum
FAQ, and the GIS FAQ
by Lisa Nyman. Lisa's GIS FAQ is also mirrored.Scott Yanoff's
Special Internet
Connections is now in HTML format.
Nick Kew and others produce the Satellite Imagery
FAQ. Nick has developed the
Web Thing which brings a new level of interactivity to the FAQ. It
intergrates the FAQ with a threaded bulletin board and a searchable
data-base. The SATFAQ may also be found at the WebThing as the Remote Sensing InterFAQ.
SAIF is the Spatial Archive and Interchange Format. The SAIF FAQ by Dale Lutz
is in html format. There is also a top page for SAIF documentation.
Published (and non-published) papers are becoming either accessable or
available via the Web. Electronic Publishing raises many issues.
The University of Michigan Press have raised some
of these issues in the
Journal of Electronic Publishing. Some of the issues raised include
copyright, digital libraries, economic, imaging issues, policy and technical
issues. MIT also have a page discussing electronic
publishing issues.
MIT have a searchable
Index of Supplements to Published Papers in meteorology and oceanography.
The index can be accessed by journal, author, newest entry or searched. A
complementary site at GFDL is the
Electronic Preprint Archive
which has information about Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences e-prints.
Vincent Granville administers the Spatial
Statistics Preprint Service wher you can submit a paper, or read a
description of, and download, a paper on spatial statistics.
The Internet Science
Journal is a refereed on-line science journal for professional and
serious amateur scientists.
Electronic Publications and PrePrints
Subject orientated starting points for Web exploration fall into two general catagories, register of Web sites and Robots, which actively seek out web servers and place their information in a searchable database.
The number of general meta-indexes on the web is increasing. These are subject/topic orientated. Some of the more common sites are Yahoo, EINet, Planet Earth. Many sites have links to these, but for an up to date list of the meta-indexes, see Telstra Corporation's page in Australia.
Yahoo, A Guide to WWW has a well catagorised list and includes What's New, What's Popular and What's Cool connections. This site is the preferred general starting point for many people. GALAXY at Einet, and Zilker Internet Park are other popular starting points.
At CERN's Virtual Library can be found Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Crystallography, Oceanography Virtual Library, Cartography and Remote Sensing list.
The ClearingHouse for subject orientated Internet Resource Guides is maintained by the University of Michigan and refers to itself as the 'premier Internet research library'.
The Geosciences link at EINet which includes topics in geochemistry, geology, geophysics and meteorology.
Bill Thoen's and Ted Smith's On-Line Resources for Earth Sciences, or ORES is a well catagorised and searchable listing links in the Earth Sciences and related fields. It has pages for the following catagories: Geography and GIS, Geology, Oceanography and Weather, Meteorology and Climate. Each category will have entries for EMail Lists, News Groups, Documents and FAQ's, Journals and Periodicals, Data and Software, and Other Hyperlink Resources. This site (it actually actually located on 2 web servers) is destined to become the premiere web sites for geoscientists.
The Anon Web Server at the University of Houston, Texas, is aimed at those interested in mathematics, computers and geosciences and the publications of Mathematical Geology and Computers in Geosciences. It has pages on Links to Internet Resources, Educational Resources or courses on the net, Geoscience On-Line Resources by Subject Matter, and Data Sets.
One of the main Earth Sciences server registers can be found at Earth and Environmental Sciences at the USGS. This index has catagories for Climate, Earth Sciences, Earth Quakes, Environment, GIS, Hydrology, Oceanography, and Volcanology.
A detailed register of seismological connections is found at Seismosurfing. This register includes Web, finger, ftp (anonymous), email and bulletin board connections. Another Geophysics site is Dr. Furuse's Prospectings of Geophysics and Tectonophysics which has a very exhaustive list of geophysical and geological connections.
The Zilker Internet Park Geoscience Page is a looked after by Hal Mueller, and includes the catagories of Catalogues and Directories, Maps, Data Sources, GIS and Mapping, GPS, Earth Science Labs and Research Teams and Other Related Information. Steven Schimmrich maintains the Structural Geology Internet Resources. The Ultimate Mineral Science Resource List is Scott Guthery's extensive Internet Resources list from the sci.geo.petroleum FAQ. Another very extensive list of Other Useful Geological Links is at the Norwegian Rockhounds Web Server. ENVision is an Internet based environmental consulting firm, and they maintain two very good listings, the Environmental Science and Engineering and Geology. Each link comes with a description of what is on each site. Another list is the Jewels of the World Wide Web from Bobs's Rock Shop. The Institute of Mineralogy at Clausthal in Germany has an index of mineralogical sites, plus a photo image mineral collection. Russ Jacobson maintains the Earthnet Info Server. It is another detailed collection of Earth Science based links and is a service of the ISGS Educational Extension Unit. The Favourite Links for an Underemployed Geologist is maintained by John Hopkins and has a great collection of links for job hunters.
For a listing of petroleum related sites, visit the Petroleum and Geosystems Sources page at the University of Texas, Austin.
The Dewey Subject Catalog gives a list of links classified according to the Dewey numbering system. Gis Net Sites by Jim Aylward used to be Frank Smith's page. It is an alphabetised hotlist. The Bureau of Land Management at Denver, CO, has a long list of links to GIS, Map, Metadata, GIS utilities and related sites. Refer to the section below on Satellite Imagery, Maps and GIS for additional links.
The Earth Environmental Science Center, or EESC, maintains a hydrology index. It has as its catagories General & Miscellaneous Resources, On-Line Data Sources, Hydrology Related Discussion Groups, Hydrology Related Mailing Lists, Scientific Societies and Research and Educational Organisations. Problems have been experienced with this url, so an alternative URL was made available.
Oceanography Links to the Web at the University of British Columbia has an excellent collection of links of organisations, tertiary institutions, on-line data and images, on-line numerical models, FAQ's and much more.
For those interested in the Antarctic, the Antarctic Science Servers maintained by ICAIR is a good starting point.
The Australian Resources Links has connections to various web sites in Australia, including AGSO, the CSIRO and its divisions (Water Resources, Petroleum, Division of Minerals etc), Landcare Web, Center for Australian Regolith Studies, plus many more.
Macquarie University's Atmospheric Science area maintains a comprehensive Internet Resources page, which includes many acronym searches, conferences, libraries, search engines, indexes and much more. It's worth a visit.
Early Web searches were based on Web Crawlers and other beasties. Koster's List of Beasties lists 35 (at last count) different web searches. The modern search engines are very sophisticated, and the data bases contain a large ammount of searchable information. The better ones are Alta Vista from Digital, Harvest from Colorado, and Lycos from Carnegie Mellon, MetaCrawler, Magellan and Yahoo.
For Harvest, look for Brokers. There is the Query Web Home Pages and the Server Register Query whery queries can be made by subject. For Lycos there is the Big Catalog Search of over 5.07 million web pages, or a Small Catalog Search with only 434K web pages.
Other robots, worms, spiders and crawler sites include Jump Station II in the UK, Web Crawler from Washington Univeristy, W3 Catalog Search and the WWW Worm from Colorado and the RBSE URL Search.
Another search engine not to be missed is ArchiePlex. This is an Archie gateway to the Web. It can help locate files on anonymous ftp sites around the world. This site is the link to all the ArchiePlex servers.
Nick Kew, who maintains the Satellite Imagery FAQ, has developed a new service. He has integrated a threaded bulletin board with a searchable data base to make the SATFAQ interactive. It is called the Web Thing (registration is required), and the FAQ is at the InterFAQ.
Various sites are combining these various search engines into one web page. NEXOR's CUSI is a unified interface for several search engines, as is the CUI/W3 page from University of Geneva. Some all in one pages give the ability to submit searches to a variety of engines divided into a variety of categories like Software, People, News, Web. The All In One Search Engine Page by William Cross and Albany Net is one such site, and another is SearchPlex from Oimage.
Many of the search sites listed above permit people to access their search servers directly from their own site. It is possible to create a web page which will present a forms based page to the requesting client, and then submit the search request to the appropriate server for processing. One such page is the The Internet Search Page. You may pull any ofd these pages down and incorporate tehm into your own HTML documents.
There is a considerable amount of information already available on gopher and wais. Gopher subject trees are similar to the web registers in that they are a list of servers catagorised according to subject. Some of the better sites are Rice University, Washington and Lee, University of Texas Subject Gopher, University of Michigan, and Gopher Jewels at USC.
Jughead is a gopher menu search facility which will search the upper levels of gopher menus and provide the user with a list of links. Some sites with Jughead searches include Washington and Lee, PSINet, and the University of Birmingham.
Veronica searches the menus on gopher servers. Some sites with Veronica include Washington and Lee, PSINet and the Australian Veronica Server.
WAIS servers are servers with seachable data bases. Some WAIS sites include Washington and Lee, Rice University. Washington and Lee University has an extensive set of connections and searches for finding internet resources. Included are Explore Internet Resources for searching INDEXES (wais and others), Searching for FILES (Archie, ftp), Searching for LISTSERVs, Searching for SUBJECTS, and USENET News Reader; NetLink Server for finding information, and Finding Gopher Resources
The gopher server at Energy Minerals Resources, a part of the Canadian Geological Survey, has a section dealing with mining information in Canada. This includes mining production information, information by metal, prices and forecasts.
FTP servers are accessable via the Web, although the WinMosaic browser seems a bit fickle on some connections. There is abundant software available via anonymous ftp, the most common geological one being the Computer Orientated Geological Society, or COGS, software collection. TheMTU Anonymous ftp site has geologically orientated images.
Telnet allows someone to login to another computer remotely. WWW can telnet to hosts, but telnet needs to be working from your Web browser. Some of these connections can also be slow.
Many universities have telnet access to their on line catalogs. Some on-line library catalogs on the east coast of Australia include Macquarie University, The Australian National University, Monash University and University of N.S.W. There is a World Libraries Link at the ANU. These sites are most likey of little or no interest to people outside of Australia, but they do show another connection type of the Web.
The Global Land Information System, or GLIS, is an interactive source of land information for use in earth science research and global change studies.
The USGS has a branch for Global Seismology and Geomagnetism for earthquake lists, epicenter determinations and geomagnetic field values. This site will time you out quickly. Another geophysical site is the World Paleomagnetic Data Base
The Classroom Earth from CIESIN is an environmental education BBS site, but the registration procedure is overly long.
As a final telnet connection, there is JANet, where you can connect to all UK systems via JANet, but you need to know where you want to go.
Mailing lists and listservs are another way of finding information about the Net and the Web. The Listserv User Guide (version 2) from the EARN Organisation gives a good account of what listservs are about and how to use them.
TILE.NET is a project by the Walter Shelby Gr. Ltd. It is a web site that links to all the discussion groups on the Internet., with the data comming from the "list global" listserv command. You can also list ftp sites and newsgroups.
The Presbyterian College at Clinton, South Carolina, maintains the List of Mailing Lists and Discussion Groups where searches can be made for publicly available Mailing Lists, List of Lists and Directory of Scholarly Electronic Conferences. Mentioned previously is the Washington & Lee Gopher Server where it is possible to search for listservs.
The Mailbase Gopher Server which is maintained by Newcastle University in the UK is the gopher server for the UK electronic mailing list service Mailbase. This gopher site lists all the mail services it maintains. Groups of interest include geo computer models, geo metamorphism and geo mineralisation.
One catagory in each geoscience section in the new ORES is based on related Mailing Lists, as the following connections indicate (NOTE that some of the following pages may not yet be posted): Geography and GIS Lists, Oceanography Lists, and General Geology Lists.
University , Governmental and other libraries are establishing Web servers and these usually give information on how to access their electronic information, on-line catalogs and other services. The Library Information Servers via WWW is an attempt at indexing all library Web servers. It was created by Thomas Dowling at Washington University. Another service offered by the University of Saskatchewan is the Libraries Information System via the Web. This is a collection of electronic services for Libraries. Another similar page is the Library Informations Servers via the Web.
The BIBSYS Search lets you search for bibliographies in the fields of Author, Title, Free text, Dewey and ISBN/ISSN number.
One type of application for the Web is data storeage and searching. A good example is the Plant Fossil Record. This site currently has descriptions of about 250,000 extinct plants from published records in its data base. This is more than a searchable data base as any named plant can be searched and its global occurrence plotted on palaeogeographic maps. Another site for palaeontologists is the Fossil Plant and Algae Type Register at the Smithsonian Dept. of Palaeontology.
Web Elements by Mark Winter at Sheffield University shows a chemical data base which need not be accessed by key-word entry. There is also Reduction potentials, Isotope abundances, Electronic configurations and Ionization enthalpies with links to things such as geological, crystallographic, biological data physical data (and more). A great on-line data base.
Catologues of samples can also be placed on line, as the Ecole des Mines de Paris have done with their Mineralogy Museum (refer to the section below on Museum Display for a fuller description).
The Volcano Page from Michigan Technical University is starting to build up a data base on volcanoes with information on location, geological setting, petrology, eruption history, imagery and other information. It includes information on recent volcanic activity. Along similar lines is the NASA EOS IDS Volcano Team, the Alaska Volcano Observatory which has good information on volcanism in Alaska. The USGS Hawaii Volcano Observatory has (nearly) weekly descriptions of activity in the Hawaiian volcanoes in its Volcano Watch Reports. Another volcanic site is the Electronic Volcano which contains information, maps, photos, texts and other links on active volcanoes and volcano resources.
NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) have a a number of Web sites to provide researchers access to the entire NASA Earth Sciences Data Collection. These are known as Distributed Active Archive Centers, or DAACs. The Information Management System (Version 0) allows users to search for and order data from several data centers in a single session (the GUI version requires an X-Windows or emulation. The Global Change Master Directory, or GCMD, provides directory-level metadata searches and directory-level information for NASA's EOSDIS program.
DAAC sites include: EDC, the Eros Data Center for land processes; CIESIN-SEDAC, The Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network - Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center for human dimensions of global environmental change, GSFC, Goddard Space Flight Center for upper atmosphere, global biosphere, atmospheric dynamics, geophysics; JPL, Jet Propulsion Labs for physical oceanography; LARC, Langley Research Center for radiation budget, tropospheric chemistry, clouds and aerosols; MSFC Marshall Space Flight Center for hydrologic cycle; NOAA SAA, National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration - Satellite Active Archive for satellite data (atmoshere, land, ocean, earth sciences, remote sensing); NSIDC National Snow & Ice Data Center for snow and ice, cryosphere and climate; ORNL, Oak Ridge National Lab for biogeochemical dynamics, and finally the Physical Oceanography DAAC which is a scientific data distribution site for Topex/Poseiden images, AVHRR Pathfinder data and other on-line data and data catalog.
As an example, it is possible to browse the data set, including the AVHRR Land Pathfinder imagery, and order data on-line, from the Goddard Space Flight Center. The NOAA/NASA Pathfinder Oceans SST Products data for 1987, '88 and '89 is now available. This data is of improved quality over earlier products, and some data can be previewed before downloading.
Earth Observing System (EOS) sites include ECS Data Handling System; Mission To Planet Earth, the Volcanogeny Team which has been mentioned previously, the POLar, Polar Exchange at the Sea Surface EOS IDS.
There is alot of information available from the USGS Web servers. There is an Index of On-Line Data that it maintains, the The FDGC Manual of Geographic Data Products, GeoData, Cartographic Data, Water Data, National Geospatial Data Clearinghouse for finding geospatial data and Publications List. The US GeoData site is associated with the EROS DAAC. It contains ftp access to Spatial Data Transfer Standard information, public domain software and a variety of USGS digital data sets such as 1:2,000,000 and 1:100,000 Digital Line Graphs and 1:250,000 and 1:100,000 Land Use and Land Cover Sets.
The Various divisions of the USGS have Web servers. Some have already been mentioned. Others include the Water Resources Division in Colorado, the Marine Geology Web Server for information on the National Marine and Coastal Geology Program and the Menlo Park Server for earthquake information, the Global Change Research Program, and the Morrison Research Institute which aims to reconstruct the evolution of the Lower Jurassic environments, climates and so forth. For those interested in Mining, the USGS has the Minerals Page. The Branch of Geochemistry also has a presence on the Net. The Marine Server has information on marine and coastal geology from the research in marine sanctuaries undertaken by the USGS. The final connection is to the list of Internet Resources which has a collection of USGS and US governmental branches, agencies and departments, amongst other collections.
The U.S. National Geographical Data Center, (NGDC) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its series of environmental data centers manages a series of on-line data services in the fields of Solid earth Physics, Solar Terrestrial Physics, Marine Geology and Geophysics, Paleoclimate Program and DMSP Satellite Data Archive. Within each field there is also a World Data Center A. Some of these inventories are fully searchable via forms, such as Marine Geology and Geophysical On-Line Inventory Searches. You can also search the NOAA Data Catalog using Mosaic forms, or the NOAA Directory by Telnet.
Other Data Centers run by NOAA include the National Climate Data Center, the National Oceanic Data Center, and the Environmental Information Services.
The Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory has data from a variety of research projects, including the RIDGE Multibeam Synthesis Project which serves multi-beam bathymetry data of the world's mid-ocean ridge systems.
The Australian Geological Survey Organisation maintains the National Geoscience Database which has databases in the fields of biostratigraphy, environment, geophysics, groundwater, marine, minerals, petroleum and regional geology/geochemistry. Another one is the National Directory of Australian Resources or NDAR. This is a meta database of descriptions of some 4,500 data sets and related information about Australian natural resources.
The Australian Government, through the Australian Geological Survey Organisation (AGSO), has initiated a project which aims at a coherent accessability of Geoscience resources on the internet. This is the Australian National Geoscientific Information System or @ngis. It will be a new national geoscience information system. It will not duplicate the current information, but will make geoscience information and data more readily locatable and accessible by building linkages between people and organisations who can provide the information and those seeking it. The Questions & Answers page has additional information plus Australian Geoscience Connections.
The Web can access gopher servers and documents and there is quite alot of on-line information aleady available via gopher. One of the better geology gopher sites is University of Texas, El Paso, Geogopher.
One type of data that is ideal for presenting on the Web is that which changes frequently. The infra-red world composite satellite images from USG Current Weather Maps are updated every 3 hours. Alternatively, you can see a composite movie. Another type of presentation from the same site is the US Weather Stations, a clickable map of the U.S. with weather stations, click on the desired station and get the current weather conditions. Along similar lines is the Automatic Weather Station at The School of Earth Sciences, Macquarie University in Australia. This gives upto date weather related information in graphical format.
The WWW Earthquake Locator from Bruce Gittings and Edinburgh University is an excellent example of what is possible using the Web and Internet. It relates the work being done at Edinburgh in building an earthquake analysis system using GIS and data dynamically gathered from the Internet. This is a MUST site to visit.
The Current Seismicity Lists at Menlo Park gives the current listings of earthquake and seismic activity. This site also has the Hot Earthquake News with links to information on recent large events around the world. The National Earthquake Information Center located on the USGS Web server, is the World Data Center A for Seismology. The Weekly Seismicity Reports from the USGS are available by an ftp connection and have record seismic events from around the world, the USA, central California and San Francisco Bay dating back to April 2nd, 1992. Global seismological data is archived by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, (IRIS), from the IRIS Data Management Center. The Smithsonian Institute has a home page for the Global Volcanism Program. Included here is the Bulletin of the Global Volcanism Network, an on-line bulletin describing the volcanic activity for each volcano from around the world.
The NSF Geosciences UNIData is a prototype for an Integrated Earth Information Server. Participating universities provide information servers which captures, stores, processes and displays realtime environmental observations from a variety of observing systems. Another goal of this system is to provide tools for use with the data. The University of Illinois has created a set of instructional material for meteorology.
One differing type of changing data is plate motions. The University of Tokyo, Ocean Research Institute, has the Plate Motion Calculator where plate motions can be calculated using the most recent plate motion model, NUVEL-1A.
Satellite Imagery, Maps and GIS
Bill Thoen's Geography and GIS section in his ORES pages is comprehensive, with catagories of Mailing Lists, News Groups, Documents & FAQs, Journals, Data and Software, and Other Hyperlinks. Bill also started a thread on the GIS Usenet news group on the topic of Web GIS: Toy or Tool? and he has summarized his results at provided links to various GIS/Maps utilising the Web.
The Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies at the University of Arkansas has some of the better GIS web pages around. The section on Information on GIS which has links to GIS and Arc Info tutorials, map servers, Usenet News Groups, Government, Military and international servers. Another section has links to US GeoSpatial data sets by Stephanen Pollard, including general catagories of Hydrologic, Hazards, Geologic Base Mapping, Geology; There is also a Clearinghouse for Subject-Orietated Internet Resource Guides.
Dubois Gregoire's homepage on Geostatistics and GIS has information on the AI-Geostatistics mailing list, links to the list archives, software, conferences and courses, and the spatial statistics faq (as yet incomplete).
Care to learn about Arc/Info and GIS, then Shane Murnion's GIS Analysis with ARCINFO will give you an introductory course. Alternatively, there is the Map Info FAQ if you want information on the software product.
For an on-line GIS application and to construct your own map of Canada, you can try The National Atlas Information Service for www based GIS, or their home page for other geographic maps and information. Geography at Edinburgh University has several pages on GIS, the GIS Home Page has connections to the GIS FAQ, Bruce Gittings DEM Catalog, and the AGI GIS Dictionary. This site also has Map Preparation which allows you to build maps which can be displayed and manipulated via the Web, and the Atlas Application in which plots of plate tectonic boundaries can be generated in real time. Perhaps one of the better "build a map via the web" sites is the GrassLinks V2.0 Public Access GIS from Berkely. Along a similar theme in Australia is the Distributed Spatial Data Library.
The AGI and University of Edinburgh have collaborated to bring you the Dictionary of GIS.
A site for GIS and RS connections is at Utrecht University.
Oliver Weatherbee maintains the Remote Sensing/GIS/GPS Data and Information. Another GIS Resource Pointer is by GIS in the Internet, This is the English language connection.
Ohio State University Dept of Geography has created several Internet resources for GIS and Mapping, including the GIS On-Line Master Bibliography, the Map Projection Bibliography and the SIGGRAPH On-Line Bibliography Database.
The Perry-Castañedu Library Map Collection is a collection of over 230,000 on-line maps covering every area of the world. Odden's Bookmarks has a collection of links to cartography, maps and atlases, electronic atlases, map collections and cartographic servers.
Speaking of GIS and maps, the US Digital Relief Images by Ray Sterner from the ETOPO5 data is worth a look. Another site with more ETOPO5 images is available in the UK.
Remote sensing sites abound. Satellite images from Nexor, the EROS DAAC being the USGS repository for remotely sensed data. Another good remote sensing site is the JPL Radar Imaging server from the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. Nick Short from GSFC has prepared a web site on Remote Sensing Tutorial. David Schneider from MTU has a page on the Introduction to Remote Sensing.
The Altimetry Atlas from the Delft Univeristy of Technology is an altimetry atlas computed from satellite altimetry data and includes gravity anomaly maps of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. Another similar site is the NOAA Geosciences Lab
Sol Katz's Detailed Metadata Homepage is compuslory reading if you're into GIS, and mapping using a Web interface. It describes, and has connections to other sites, detailing metadata, spatial data, spatial geographic searches, spatial WAIS from the USGS, Mapper, NAISmap, various map browsers, interactive Grass and MapInfo. Basically, any sort of spatial interface via Web clients. This should be visited.
The Virtually Hawaii page at Univ. of Hawaii Satellite Oceanography Lab. has a great collection of satellite images, not only of Hawaii but of other significant natural events. Some images are real time.
The creation of maps is a seperate field of endeavour, but geoscientists should be familiar with some aspects of it. The Geography Dept. at the University of Texas at Austin have several pages of information. Included are Map Projection Notes by Peter Dana, Geodetic Datum Overview and the Coordinate Systems Overview. Surveying is another endeavour related to mapping. The On-Line Resources for Land Surveying is Clearinghouse approved.
Navigation systems are playing an ever increasing role in todays world. One of the better sites for GPS is Peter Dana's Global Positioning Systems Home Page. This site was nominated one of GIS World's Best of the Net '96. Another site with good information on radionavigation systems is the U.S. Coast Guard's Navigation Center which has information on Global Positioning Systems, the Differential GPS in the US, the OMEGA System, and the Loran-C System.
For those interested in grid and mesh generation there is the Mesh Generation Page by Robert Scheidners, and the Meshing Research Corner a description of available literature on mesh generation by Steve Owens.
Oceanography is not forgotten, with Ocean Network Information Center which maintains the OCEANIC data base. The Alfred Wegener Institute mantains a research station in the Antarctic and has a home page for its data. Included is a Hydro-Atlas of the Southern Ocean with temperatures, salinity, density and oxygen distribution on-line, and a data base of polar and marine related documents on the Web and ozone soundings. Another site that deals with the mapping of oceanographic features from satellite data is the Ocean Color Section of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center DAAC.
The Ocean Research Institute in the University of Tokyo is an excellent oceanographic site with a comprehensive register of other oceanographic servers. It also has a Reference Searcher which searches references from K.Tamaki's personal reference data base that has been constructed since 1985. Also included is the Interactive Hydrographic Map from the Levitus' 1982 dataset, and the Plate Motion Calculator where you can calculate plate motions using the NUVEL-1A plate motion model
The Satellite Oceanography Laboratory at SOEST, University of Hawaii at Manoa, has a good collection of NOAA-14 and other real time and archived images.
A collection of Oceanography and related sites can be found at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Another list of Oceanography Links to the Web is at the University of British Columbia. It has a collection of links of organisations, tertiary institutions, on-line data and images, on-line numerical models, FAQ's and much more.
Thoen and Smith's ORES resource has an Oceanography section.
As mentioned previously, the Earth Environmental Science Center, or EESC, maintains a very comprehensive hydrology index. It has as its catagories General & Miscellaneous Resources, On-Line Data Sources, Hydrology Related Discussion Groups, Hydrology Related Mailing Lists, Scientific Societies and Research and Educational Organisations. The Groundwater Remediation Project at the National Water Research Institute in Canada is establishing a groundwater resource list which includes software sites and calendar events. Thoen and Smith's ORES resource has an Hydrology section.
Paleontology and Museum Displays
One of the first unique Web sites in the Earth Sciences is the Museum of Palaeontolgy, an on-line interactive natural history museum at Berkeley. This site has well presented exhibits and on-line catalogs. It is still given as a 'demonstration site' by NCSA in Mosaic. Ben Waggoner maintains the Other Museum Collection Catalog which has areas of Paleontology, Botany, Other Inverterbrates. Also present is the List of Natural Histrory Resources which has connections to museums, on-line exhibits, journals and newsletters, societies and other resources. Don't miss out on the Geological Time Machine where you can get information on the Earth's history and life forms from the pre Cambrian to the Holocene.
Another of the better Paleontogical Museums is the Royal Tyrrell Museum. This is another 'must see' site. Of interest is the Tour of the museum, plus their other links.
Another museum to follow is the Dinosaur Exhibit at the Honolulu Community College. This is another on-line interactive museum with a narrated tour. Another paleontological museum is the Fossil Vertebrates at the Burke Museum which catalogs over 43000 fossil fish, reptiles, dinosaurs, birds and mammal specimens. The Natural History Museum at Bern, Switzerland, is also worth a visit.
The Museum On-Line Resource Review is by the Overall Knowledge Co., Inc. It has a keyword search/catagory search of its Directory of Museum Products and Services and of related web sites.
Science Education Online has pointers to Centers and Museums which stress "interactive" science education.
Kevin's Page of Death with the attached Trilobites Page, and Prem's Fossil Page of trilobites, graptolites and Pennsylvanian plants, plus his other paleontological links are good starting points for palaeontology links.
The Hadrosaurus Foulkii is a tour of the world's first dinosaur skeleton find at Haddonfield, NJ, detailing the 1858 find by William Foulke and takes you on a guided tour of the site. The Burgess Shale is one of the most complete and well preserved invertebrate faunas anywhere. It is Mid Cambrian.
The Radiolarian Page will present updates and developments on biostratigraphy and tectonic implications of new radiolarian discoveries in the Canadian Cordillera.
Recent & Fossil Bryozoa are on the Web, and there is an on-line Catalogue of Bryozoan Types at the Swedish Museum.
Not quite a museum display, the Volcano World is an information page directed at school children and visitors to the Hawaii Volcano National Park and Mt. St. Helens National Monument.
Physical Geography and the Environment
The Australian Resource Information Network, (ERIN), is an excellent environmental site. It has a WAIS search of its server plus NDVI satellite imagery.
Another environmental site is the Environmental Protection Authority. This has searchable facilities of the high level pages. It has connections to other (US) governmental and environmental sites. EnviroWeb is advertised as the world's largest environmental online archive and the clearinghouse for all online environmental information. It has a good environmental resources section. The Environmental Resource Center is a cooperative between industry and multiple levels of government. It has access to stored environmental data and includes a WAIS searches of environmental data bases. To assist in Natural Hazards Reduction, the NGDC Natural Hazards Data links to the databases and information provided by the NGDC in several areas of natural hazards, including earthquakes, tsunami and world stress.
Environmental Hydrosystems, is a water resources and environmental consulting firm which offers a lot on the Net, including a Hot List of environmental, water resources and Earth Science links (which are created by an automated hot list generator, plus the EnviroMod Data Warehouse Broker, to search all known pertinent sites to groundwater and environmental modelling. Refer to The Soft Earth for their software links.
The Geomorphology Lab from Miami University has a list of links to Web Resources for Geomorphologists.
The Petrographic Workshop is a database of mineralogical information used in the identification process of rocks and minerals. Information is both textual and microscopic images. It is from the UCLA and is part of the Physical Sciences Learning Center. The Athena Mineralogy site has mineral lists with a systematic classification and is searchable. It also has links to other Mineralogy servers. Another great site with a systematic classification of minerals is Mineral Galleries from Amethyst Galleries Inc. Included is a Minerals by Class and a full text search, and a description of the Physical Characteristics of minerals.
Other mineralogical sites include Bern's Museum of Natural History with various collections of rocks, minerals and ores from Switzerland. The Smithsonian Institute in association with EINet have an on-line gem and mineral collection. The Mineralogy Museum at Ecole des Mines de Paris has placed its mineral catalogue on-line. The catalogue of type specimens can be accessed by author, mineral, date of first publication, atoms in chemical formula and holotypes, cotypes, metatypes, author samples and dedicated samples. There is also a catalogue of best samples, many with drawings and photographs.
Web servers and browsers are increasingly being used as a teaching aide within the Earth Sciences, both for in-house students and for remote teaching. The ANON Server at the University of Houston has the Virtual Geosciences Professor gives many links to Higher Education Geology Resources on the Web, categorised by Courses by Title, Courses by University, Course Resources and Field Trips. This is a 'must see' site for those interested in using the Web as a teaching aid.
Along a similar theme is the Virtual Library for Pamela Gore's Students at DeKalb College. Plenty of resources for her Geology 101 and Geology 1021 courses. Look at the Students projects for the Fall, 1995 and Winter, 1996.
A similar site, but not as advanced, is the Courseware from UBC. The Introduction to Petrology pages are a good use of the Web in teaching.
Dave Waters has compiled the Resources for Earth Science Teaching. It is links of internet related material for teaching in the Earth Sciences organised into topics like Teaching Material Resources, Earth Science Education Resources, On-line course material in the Earth Sciences, Virtual Field Trips and Software Sources. Terry Gordon's WWW Teaching Pages is a compilation of WWW sites dealing with the use of WWW in teaching.
Specific Web based courses include Jack Rice's Introductory Course on Mineralogy at the University of Oregon, and John Butler's Physical Geology course at the University of Houston.
Another education site is the Physical Science Learning Center at UCLA. This operates under the auspices of the Science Challenge to promote the use of computers in physical science education, especially in introductory courses. The Earth System Science Education Program is a co-operative University based program in conjunction with the USRA. The ESSE Notes have a summary of new sites of interest for earth Sciences. The University of Texas has established the Geography Virtual Department which attempts to link cirricula among Geography Depts. throughout the Internet and the Web. Links within this site include: On-Line Courses and Virtual Resources, being resouces for geographers and teachers such as GIS, maps, cartography. A site with links to general education and education resources is the Education Resources Page from Class IV Publishing. Other educational sites include the Statistical Courses with Home Pages which is compiled by Tony Rossini, and the Geology Courses on the Internet from the World Lecture Hall, which currently has two courses available - Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Other Hazards, and Submarine Geology. There is also the Distance Learning in GIS page from GISNet.
The Geoscience K12 Resources is an ongoing project to list relevant K12 Geoscience resources that are available on the net.
Why pick a career in Geosciences at all? Find out at Careers in Geoscience page from the University of Waterloo, thanks to a keynote speaker at NAGT-ES Toronto.
Still on the education theme is a server of a different type. The Diversity University Lambda Moo Server is a MOO campus. These are internet locations for experimenting in network based interactive teaching, learning and social services.
The Computer Orientated Geological Society acts as a clearinghouse for information on methodologies, software and datasets for geologists with an interest in computers.
The University of Edinburgh's Geology and Geophysics Number Crunchers Forum aims to promote discussion and development of numerical methods and help spread computing experience.
Mineral collectors can visit the Rockhounds Page which has a variety of connections, including one to the Copper Country Mineral Guide at Michigan Tech. Another collector's page is the Norwegian Rockhound. This has a collection of minerals found in Norway over the last 3-4 years.
Bobs Rock Shop doesn't sell specimens, but is a unique site in what it offers. Worth a look.
The Virtual Geomorphology is a 'virtual text book' on geomorphology with contributions from various authors. EUROLAT is the European Network on Lateritic Weathering and Global Environment at the Technical University, Germany. It has a good Virtual Library with Earth Science Journals
The Indiana-Purdue University Fort Wayne has two things of interest, the GeoGarden and the Web Accessible Diffractometer (you do need to obtain a password from IPFW). RockNet from Sandia is a rock mechanics based web server which has a good index for other related Web sites.
CFD Resources On-Line is a collection of links, software and computer mediated communications biased towards Computational Fluid Dynamics.
The Atlantic Geoscience Center has three pages of interest:
The Geololgy in the Classroom where you can submit a geological question to the scientists at the AGC.
An Animation of the Rotating Earth. The animation was developed with local display software using the public domain ETOPO5 grid.
The USGS also runs an Ask A Geologist over the Web wher you email them direct, or you can click here to get more information.
Geological Surveys and Organisations
The Web servers given here are purely for the sake of completeness, and may be considered a 'conclusion', for this Web page. The fact that various geological surveys are establishing Web servers indicates that the Web is becoming an accepted means of global information disemination and retrieval.
The first connection is to the Scholarly Societies Project from the University of Waterloo's Electronic Library which aims to facilitate access to information about scholarly societies across the world.
Web servers can be found at The Australian Geological Survey Organisation, the UK Geoscience Information Group, the British Geological Survey, The Geomagnetism Group from the British Geological Survey, the British Antarctic Survey, the Geological Survey of Canada, the Atlantic Geoscience Center which is a branch of the Geological Survey of Canada, The Geological Survey of Finland, The Geosciences Information Group from the UK Geological Society, the Geological Survey of Japan, the Americal Geological Institute, (and their Member Societies), the Paleontological Society, the American Association of Stratigraphic Palynologists and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. There is also the Association of Polish Geomorphologists. Finally is the United States Geological Survey, which is perhaps the icon of web servers in the Earth Sciences.
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