All posts by Jackie VanderPol

Protecting Urban History

Researchers demonstrate how lidar, combined with imagery and hyperspectral data, helps prevent costly damage to historic buildings in urban construction zones. With every new underground urban rail or roadway tunnel, deep foundation shaft for a new building, or even simple streetscape upgrade, historically significant archi­tecture in older city centers can become vulnerable. Earth displacement from...

Herman Strydom and associate Guillaume van der Walt take a break and look out over the southern Atlantic Ocean with the RIEGL VZ-2000i on the remote Namibia coast. The remains are a part of Pomona, once a thriving diamond mining town in the African Sperrgebiet.

Geospatial Adventure: Ghost Towns and Diamond Mine Memories

Diamond mine memories: A century or so ago, miners in the small settlement of Pomona pulled 50,000 carats of diamonds a month from the vast, arid nothingness of land called the Sperrgebiet—10,000 square miles of coastal desert in southwestern Namibia in Africa.  The sandy ground has long since given up the last of its precious...