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re-engineering the earth
An article in the most recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly explores aggressive “geo-engineering” projects: “Humans have been aggressively transforming the planet for more than 200 years. The Nobel...
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its prettiness and romance will then be gone
As long as I’m on the subject of urban parks that serve as components of flood management systems, I ought to mention the recent Buffalo Bayou Promenade in Houston, which is not only an admirable and...
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the best architecture of the decade
[The Large Hadron Collider] The end of a decade inspires a lot of list compiling; in that spirit, mammoth offers an alternative list of the best architecture of the decade, concocted without any claim...
View Articleour decrepit infrastructures
In the wake of last Monday’s Long Island Rail Road snafu — where “a tiny electrical fire in an obscure contraption of levers and pulleys installed nearly a century ago” knocked out train service for...
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matter battle sublime
[Gravity Probe B, the most perfect sphere humans have created, comes within 40 atomic layers of matching its Platonic Form. The litany of innovations it took to conduct a theoretically simple...
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six dams and six reservoirs
[Fort Peck Lake (top), Spillway (middle) and Dam (above), in northeast Montana; built between 1933 and 1940, Fort Peck is the world's largest "hydraulically-filled" dam, which means that it was...
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dike field
[A dike field in the Mississippi River near Greenfield, Mississippi; via bing maps.] In the Mississippi River, dike fields are constructed in order to direct the river’s flow to a central channel,...
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casting fields
[Map of revetments under the purview of the Army Corps of Engineers' Team New Orleans, on the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers; image produced by mammoth using data from the Army Corps.] I’ve...
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atchafalaya ii: old river control
[The Auxiliary Structure at Old River Control; photographed by the Army Corps of Engineers, Team New Orleans. Various circumstances have conspired to keep me from finishing the Floods series last week...
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atchafalaya iii: the morgan city floodwall
[The twin Atchafalaya river ports of Morgan City (on the east bank) and Berwick (on the west bank), captured in false-color by the "Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer" on...
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restoring the land-making machine
[The fluctuating terrain of the lower Mississippi River Delta, from the USGS's map of "land area change in coastal Louisiana from 1932 to 2010". Loss is in red; accumulation is in green. The map is...
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reversing the chicago river
One of the more spectacular engineering accomplishments of the United States in the late nineteenth century was the reversal of the Chicago River. Through the construction of a series of canals — most...
View Articleunconventional intersections
At Slate, Tom Vanderbilt writes about the design of intersections to eliminate left-turns, which historically produced such oddities as the Jersey jughandle and the Michigan left, as well as more...
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giant tube to supply water for ten millions
The wonder of inter-basin transfer, in the August 1937 issue of Popular Mechanics: (The cover of that same issue, which wonders at the electrical power produced by and transmitted from Lake Mead, is...
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