Sunday, June 17, 2007

Where on (Google)Earth #15?

Brian has kindly offerend to share the joy of his "Where on Google Earth?" series, so I figured I would step up to the plate. This entrant is dedicated to billabongs*:


Veterans of the series will note that I added a scale bar. I did so for three reasons:
1. It is good practice.
2. It will hopefully level the playing field for mortals against GoogleEarth gods like Ron, who can asertain the scale through diabolical means.
3. It might even help the educational value of these pictures, by giving people a feel for the size of the features shown.

* Known to Americans as ox-bow lakes

7 comments:

BrianR said...

this is difficult...but fun to be on the other side

i have a growing placemark database of rivers now....but still haven't found it

if Ron's computer crashed or his internet connection isn't working, then I still might have a chance

ScienceWoman said...

that is an absolutely gorgeous meander olain, but I don't know where it is.

C W Magee said...

Yeah, I was actually looking up a site of historical interest, when my eye was drawn to all these beautiful curves downstream...

But that's enough of a hint until we get some guesses posted.

Ron Schott said...

Before the clue I was looking upstream of the point of historical interest at the beautiful meanders of the Pripiats River in the area east and west of Petrikov, Belarus. But thanks to the clue I checked downstream of Chernobyl, Ukraine and what do you suppose I found? Thanks, Chuck!

P.S. I presume a 24 hour head start is fair?

Ron Schott said...

Okay folks, here's Where on (Google) Earth #16?. Good luck!

C W Magee said...

Ron,
Mind sharing a secret or two? How did you even know which continent to look at?

Ron Schott said...

I didn't have a clue which continent to look on at first. In fact, if it hadn't been for your clue I might still be looking.

I looked on many continents to begin with. I decided pretty quickly that North America's floodplains were too built up in general to support such a beautiful wide and apparently uncultivated floodplain. (Though when you indicated the point of historical interest my gut instinct was to recheck the area downstream of Vicksburg, MS.)

I realized that the area had to have very little topographic relief, but that didn't turn out to be that helpful in narrowing things down. So basically I just started looking all over the globe for well-developed meandering rivers. I knew from the scale that this was not one of the major rivers of the world, but probably a tributary - something on the scale of the Wisconsin River rather than the Mississippi.

Beyond that I was simply trying to match the colors of the imagery and the specific geometry of the river. Like I mentioned above, I had stumbled on the Pripiats River in Belarus and it looked promising, but I didn't follow it downstream beyond Mozyr, Belarus because it seemed to lose its meandering character there - though if I had thought about it I'd have realized that it was turning toward the proper orientation.

Anyhow, I gave up for a while and didn't check back until after you had posted the hint. After checking Vicksburg I thought about the fact that there were probably other rivers in the Eastern European region that had a character similar to the Pripiats and so I thought about what sort of historical sites I might find in the region and Chernobyl popped into my head. Bingo!

P.S. Congratulations on nailing WoGE #16! That was a lot quicker than I expected. It'll be interesting to see if anyone comes up with the journal article.