Saturday 8 September 2007

A fabulous aerial photo....

originally posted on 22nd August 2007

The title for this post says it all really! After 18 days on the road, Mark has reached the south of Romania. The capital, Bucharest lies some 20 miles or so south west of where the GPS tracker
is located on the image above. If you haven't got to grips with the tracker yet, then you should get across to http://www.artemisworldcycle.com/ and click on the image which looks like this...
This will take you to an aerial photo (part of Google maps) which locates Mark's exact position. The photo is zoomable and by using the slider bar on the left of the screen you can either zoom out to see a larger area or zoom in for close up views. The quality of the images depends on the resolution of the aerial photos available for each area.
In the image above of southern Romania, there is a river meandering from left to right. My atlas reveals that this is the River Ialomita, another tributary of the Danube. Once again, there is a lot of Geography in the view - even from this height! Apart from the river features which we discussed yesterday (and there are lots of meanders, abandoned meanders and traces of old meanders), the land use along the river is quite distinctive. It is obviously an intensively farmed area - no doubt benefitting from fertile soils laid down by the river. What is interesting is that there is obviously a tendency for the river to flood as the land use on the flood plain of the river is quite different. The soils look different and there is more land under grass and trees than on the drier land above the floodplain. If you look closely, you can also see how settlement, both villages and individual farmhouses, avoids the floodplain and is located at its drier margins.

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