Project Description

Information, awareness, prevention and research. These are our goals. Moving science near the people

With our blog, we pretend to gather information about: Kind of natural risks; Tools and information to manage and avoid these risks; and Specific threats in Argentina.

We georeference the information about specific risk, in maps place on the site, pointing if they are in a specific place (volcano), or the risk is an area around the placemarck (floods). When we’ll have enough information, we’ll place it in one or more KML (international standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium) file to do the information more accessible and attractive for people and to spread (eg with Google Earth or other geographical software layers). We believe are necessary both: information and make information attractive for people using new tools. It could help people to locate the risks, and to learn about risks they have around and act responsibly. We hope spreading that information and doing it accessible and understandable to everyone it could be easier to prevent disasters.

We are researching in technical reports and maps, to identify the risk. Many times mining research find important things related to risks, but as they are looking for minerals, they don’t publish these insights, and we want to find them. We are also organizing some field trips to identify some risks which are unpublished at all. We want to promote some local-based research groups in natural risks. Argentina is huge, and there are no risk maps in the vast majority of the territory. We want to provide people (eg teachers or students in rural schools) with tools and motivation to research about their places.

We also want to became a point of reference for everybody who do research in that field in Argentina in order to collect information or share their insights with everybody. With that science will help to understand our world, and to avoid disasters

Inspiration

All around the world disasters happen: floods, landlines, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions. Then, people talk about natural disasters. But in fact most of these so called “natural disasters” are not natural. Earth moves, it’s natural; if we learn about, it won’t be dangerous. There are many risks, which become threats and when something happen: i.e. when a volcano start to erupt. But the vast majority of these disasters only happens when people is not responsible: we build too close to the river, we ignore to scientists who claim about an eruption… Then, most disasters are easy to prevent with information and research. In Argentina there are no public and complete information about that. Geological Service have published only 8 risk maps for tinny areas of our country. And they don’t monitored the volcanoes.

To avoid disasters we must act, with participatory alternatives: spreading information, increasing awareness, and promoting prevention and research. And that’s our project about.

Who will enjoy this the most?

People who want to learn more about their cities, towns, villages.

People, associations, NGOs, local authorities, who want to prevent disasters.

Scientists interested in natural risks.

Students and teachers. We wan to do a site and some materials interesting and attractive. As we are students, it’s really frustrating to us suffer really boring class about science when we know science is not boring, but fascinating. That’s why we think in our project as something useful for teachers and students: if we prove that geo-sciences could be more attractive way with our materials (for example or KML layers for Google Earth), it could be useful for teachers & students. We also want to open the eyes of many other students to really fascinating things which happen around them: powerful rivers which can erode big mountains, a hill which hide a volcano… and encourage them to start researching about all these things.

The Project

Our site is currently in Spanish but with an English Section:

www.mitierrasemueve.com.ar