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Move fast and break things. Where have we heard this before? They even broke the USGS earthquake maps. Yesterday morning you could check the site for new quak
by doodlebugging 2y ago
Move fast and break things.
Where have we heard this before?
They even broke the USGS earthquake maps. Yesterday morning you could check the site for new quakes anywhere on earth and end up with a really good idea where it was on earth because there were several map styles available as overlays - Terrain, gray scale, street, ocean, etc.
Yesterday afternoon the only map layer available was an ocean layer showing continents, islands, seafloor profiles etc with no place names available at all.
Late yesterday night or early this morning they added another layer, USGS topo, that has generalized landforms and cultural stuff like roads, with enough detail that you can zoom in and find your town here in the USA. The problem is that this layer is totally broken outside the US.
If you are like me and you're monitoring new activity in the Aegean Sea that topo layer is completely broken. If you zoom to a level where you would expect to see individual towns, etc you will find the Aegean Sea labeled as being in the Pacific Ocean and all the coastline and landform data completely broken so that it isn't possible to identify any of the islands that could be affected in the region.
If you look at all the seas in the Mediterranean you will find it labeled as the Pacific Ocean and that label persists all the way across the Atlantic at that zoom level until Bermuda where you can see the Atlantic Ocean label.
Frankly, whoever did this probably has a good start on eating a giant bag of dicks.
- throwway120385 2y agoThis stuff was incredibly valuable when my SO and I were on vacation overseas. Also, I'm sure there are a ton of consular and embassy employees around the world that rely on USGS data. It's just an accident that it's also exporting the work product of the US government overseas.
- yujzgzc 2y agoIs this DOGE's doing?
- doodlebugging 2y agoYes. It is happening contemporaneously with all the other bullshittery so I think it is a reasonable conclusion that DoGE personnel directed by someone likely unelected and so far unaccountable are the parties responsible. I'm not sure why someone would intentionally destroy the utility of a site that has been extremely useful, not only for Americans but for people anywhere who needed to understand earthquakes and their local historical seismicity.
- kennyloginz 2y agoProbably broke when changing the Gulf of Mexico name.
- doodlebugging 2y agoI agree. That would explain all the place names for water features being broken.
- yujzgzc 2y agoI don't know. Stuff breaks all the time for other more mundane reasons too. I thought you had some inside info about it.
- doodlebugging 2y agoI'm not an insider. I'm a geophysicist. The USGS earthquake site is one of the sites that I cycle through multiple times a day if I get the opportunity. I can't remember at time in at least the last 15 years when the site has not worked flawlessly serving data about new and historical seismicity from all over the globe in a way that allowed the user to customize the view to fit their own needs. I agree with a couple of posters that think this may be an effort to rename the GoM to the GoA since all the place names are missing from the Ocean map and the places names that are present on the USGS topo map are full of stupid errors that suggest that they modified naming of water features and it broke something for their map layer. As an oil and gas industry person I have to chuckle to think about all the things that have to happen for that industry to ever come into compliance with this bullshit renaming. There are thousands of wells in databases globally named with a Gulf of Mexico nomenclature. That's just the wells. Each of them likely has multiple dozen products with a GoM tag to identify the well it belongs to. There are probably millions of line miles of seismic data from dozens of large and small seismic data acquisition projects, all of which use GoM nomenclature since the standard nomenclature in the industry relates things to a Client, Line, Area, Survey or similar parameters so that if it happened in the Gulf it will have GoM in the name somewhere and in the metadata associated with the project since that is how you geolocate things in the industry. You reference it to an actual physical location known to less than a cm in many cases. Sounds like a lot of busy work for anyone in the industry and possibly an opportunity for a consultant to step in and handle all the renaming that will need to happen if there is any effort to comply. They'll need to know multiple databases upside down and sideways since each operator manages things their own way. And they'll need to be comfortable sitting idle while the IT guys sort out access permissions for every legacy file and folder once they discover where the data management division has them stored. You'll also be the fall guy if some of the data gets corrupted but, shit happens. Sounds like a sweet gig.
- jacobolus 2y agoI believe they deleted all of the map layers because they couldn't figure out how to write "Gulf of America" on them instead of "Gulf of Mexico".
- doodlebugging 2y agoThe most likely reason since it broke so many water features. Pretty obvious that they aren't sending their best to do their dirty work. These DoGE guys are ultimately expendable and if things go south for the current administration the DoGE guys will need to be absorbent enough to handle all the blame that will fall on them when people begin to be held accountable. They need to be multi-layered Downy guys. The men at the top will slick themselves down with lawyers so it all slides downhill and hang everyone else out to dry once they are past their usefulness date.