Back to Valdivia part 3

(because logistical problems, I didn´t have internet conection last week, so I couldn`t post, but I made my homework on paper, so I will transfer my writings now)

October 21st

Last day on the congress for me, because tomorrow it`s the field seasson, and I don`t have enought cash to go.

But saying the true, it was the better day until now of this week. First in the morning my favourite topic was GIS (Geographic Information Systems), but as we geography students know, GIS aren`t a topic for itself, are a tool made to make easier other areas, like hidrology, glaciology, biogeography, and others. So this morning the topics were "Detection and analisys of ground`s uses changes on the center zone, north side of the province of Captain Prat between 1984 and 2003", In the investigation, they concluded a reduction of wetlands and pasturelands, and a grown of the forest use. Honestly I`m not very interested on the conclutions, but the methods used are interesting, using images from TM and ETM+ satellitar sensors and the radiometric, atmospheric and topographic corrections.

Other topic was "Development of a ground`s use change surveillance system for continental Chile" and this one was mainly about the surveillance of the native forest via satellite, and the study of aereal photogrametric pictures of the territory, scales 1:25000 and 1:50000. And the need of make a database with all this info, at country level.

Another was "Inventory of urban woods on Valdivia city". Nothing new, even us on second year can do it. Take the UTM coordenates with a GPS from every wood on the inventory, or if we have a high quallity satellital picture (with a 50cm resolution per pixel for example) we can georeference the image and search the wood on the picture. After that we can calculate the dimentions of the tree, and put the info on the database.

enought of gis for one morning...

at lunchtime, I tried to find a friend, studing chemistry and pharmacy, but she was on a test, so went to the fastfood post, and ate a hotdog.

at the afternoon, I went to megaseisms room. The expositors were my former teachers of forest engineering, but the ones of the geociencies institute. Lots of interesting information, for example the changes on the river`s flow at the moment of the february`s earthquake, and the next months. My former climatology teacher exposed that almost all the basins increase the waterflows between 50% and 70% even 100% on one case. Why? are a lot of posible reasons, maybe the collapse of underground acuifers...

another was about the earthquake of 1960, the reconstruction, the mistakes of the construction, and what would happen if Valdivia suffer a similar tsunami again.

One of the experts of the 1960`s earthquake (my former teacher of geology) spoke about the physical and geodesic process of that earthquake, compared with the process of february... and doesn´t look like good news...

and with all the respect that the other expositors own, I was very tired at that point, and was unable to have more atention. So I left the congress, to went back to my city once again.

I walked arround the river, and sitted on the bridge, watching the day die, and how the lights began to decorate the calle-calle river, until suddenly I notice the most beautiful jewel on the water: a big and shiny white pearl. So I went back to the house, singing a song about the moon bathing at the calle-calle river...