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Written 16 March 1994

An edited version of this article appeared in Geographical magazine.

This version is © copyright 1996 Mike Holderness; moral rights are asserted.

Geographers sans frontières

GEOGRAPHERS are a minority on the Internet. A few pioneer geographers, and more who work in related fields, are making use of it. The more who do, the more useful it will become to everyone else.

The most immediately visible parts of "the Net" are the 2000-odd "news-groups" -- the local jargon for discussion fora. In these, users distribute messages which are visible to all others who care to look, and possibly to respond. Pedants -- in whom the Net is rich -- point out that they are properly referred to not as part of the Internet, but as "Usenet"; many propagate beyond the Internet to other systems, like the IBM-inspired BITNET.

Three news-groups will be of interest to at least some geographers. The group sci.geo.geology receives about 20 messages a day. Most of these are requests for information. The content of sci.geo.meteorology is self-explanatory. It's also receiving about 20 messages a day; in the past it's been flooded with often-vituperative, and usually more passionate than informed, arguments about the validity of climate modelling, the prospects for global warming, and the necessity for Americans to give up their cars.

The fluid geology group sci.geo.fluids is quiet at the moment, but some people who read it were helpful a year ago, when I posed obscure questions about the underground gasification of coal.

The next most obvious means of sharing information is a "mailing list": if a news-group is a parish newsletter, a mailing list is an 18th-century corresponding society. Each members' messages to the list are forwarded to all others.

There are several active mailing lists on BITNET. The contents of one are echoed on Usenet as the news-group bit.listserv.geograph. When I sampled this, it, was receiving three or four messages a day, most of which were requests for information and for geographers' electronic mail addresses.

Where the Internet immediately comes into its own, though, is as a means of sharing data. Those with a high-speed link can retrieve satellite images from a number of NASA computers and elsewhere.

The problem is discovering where on the Net this information is. One way, if you have access to it, is the "veronica" feature of the "gopher" program. Gopher burrows through the net to Go Fer information. Veronica is the "very easy rodent-oriented net-wide index to computerized archives"; she/it searches through the "gopherspace" of titles for pieces of relevant information.

My search turned up a very useful -- if two-year-old -- document compiled by Bill Thoen, listing 38 pages of computer-based tools and services for geographers. You can get it by File Transfer Protocol (ftp) from host ftp.csn.org; once logged on as "anonymous", type the command "get /COGS/internet.resources.earth.sci". (Please wait a random number of days before doing so, or this magazine's name will be mud in Colorado.)

Much other useful information is catalogued by gopher under the heading DIGIT (Digitally Integrated Geographic Information Technologies). This includes pointers to extensive archives of geological and meteorological maps. You can get the last week's UK weather satellite pictures, for example, by ftp from the Edinburgh University host ftp.met.ed.ac.uk. (Please don't all do this at once!) This service is threatened, though, by proposals by the Meteosat organisation to encrypt its images in 1995 -- in order to protect revenue from selling the pictures. Martin Allwright at the Met Office does say that they're looking at means of issuing licenses for educational use.