This is not current

Just realized I still had this blog  up and have not figured out how to remove it.  This was a school project for a geography class and is not current.

Hawaii

Okay Long Island and Hawaii, well they are both Islands! They also both have surfing, although Hawaii has much better surf, but here is some great video clips of Long Island surfing, followed by some comparisons to Hawaii surfing, you will notice that the surf is from pre hurricane waves, that is on Long Island before a large storm or a huricane hits the waves are always much better, so that is prime surf time.

Hawaii Surf

This one is a 65 foot wave at Jaws surfed by Mike Parsons, makes the Long Island surfing look like it is done in a bathtub.

Okay surfing aside Long Island and Hawii are opposite in regards to land ownership and urbanizaiton. With Hawaii being mostly large plots of land and relativly few landowners, Long Island is made up of smaller plots of land and has millions of landowners. Long Island is very urban compared to Hawaii which is mostly rural.

Now another thing that the two places have in common are birds, and much like Hawaii, Long Island is home to some nearly extinct birds that need preservation. The Piping Plover is in danger with only 309 pairs of these birds on the Atlantic Coast, a major breeding area is Long Island. Just like with Hawaii human encroachment and all that goes with it caused a third of thier birds to go extinct, Long Island has the same problem, but to a lesser degree. Also plants like the Sanplain gerardia are endangered and might go extinct due to human encroachment and development. (http://www.fws.gov/northeast/nyfo/es/lirecovery.htm)

Now on a lighter note, I feel strongly that any talk about Hawaii would not be complete without the following tribute to Jack Lord and Tom Selleck:



All kidding aside, the introductions to each of these classic television shows highlight many features that Hawaii has to offer, take a closer look at the views from the helicopter in the Magnum video, and the tourist industry and urbanization is very apparent from Hawaii 5-O.

The North Pacific Coast

The The North Pacific Coast  and Long Island have almost opposite physical features. With Long Island being very flat, the highest elevation being Jaynes Hill according to the NED, National Elevation Dataset, being 387 feet. Walt Whitman was born near this hill, and there is a plaque at the summit with some of his writing:

The contrast to the The North Pacific Coast with its vast mountain ranges, containing the highest elevation point in North America Mt. McKinley, Alaska at 20,327 feet is 19,940 feet higher than Long Islands highest point. Roughly 3.75 miles higher! Here is a video clip of Rex Pemberton reaching the summit of Mt. McKinley:

(mostly just because the view is awesome)



The North Pacific Coast is also the only place other than Hawaii that has active volcanic activity in the United States. There is no volcanic activity on Long Island at all. Here are some clips from Mt St. Helens eruption in 1980, located in the southern part of the Cascades.



This clip gives some great scenic information on the Cascades, as well as great information on Mt. St. Helens, it is a bit long but a great watch.

Now there are some similiar economic activities that occur in both The North Pacific Coast, and Long Island and one of the most obvious is probably fishing and related industries. The North Pacific Coast has Shellfish farms and so does Long Island, as well as fishing off the coastal waters. Here is a bit about some of the fare available on Long Island, as well as a quick comparison between East and West coast, although not totally specific to the North Pacific Coast and Long Island it is worth a watch.



California

What does the Long Island Vicinity and California have in common? Toursim, industry, fishing and gaming, farming, being a part of an incredibly urban and megalopolis environment, traffic problems and ubran sprawl and believe it or not FAULT LINES! California of course everyone knows is earthquake central in the United States, the dreaded San Andreas Fault line is something most Americans have knowledge of. What many people do not know is that there is a big fault line very close to Long Island called the Ramapo Fault System, that occasionally shakes up the Long Island area with small quakes, now it is not on Long Island but close enough that the quakes are felt quite well on the Island.

There is another fault like off the coast of Long Island under the Atlantic Ocean, the East Coast Boundary Fault, but it is mostly stable. Much of the big geologic activity in the fault lines along this Long Island area were 200 million years ago or more. This link is to a great article that has lots of information about the geologic makeup of the area, it is made available by the New York State Museum.

http://gretchen.geo.rpi.edu/roecker/nys/nys_edu.pamphlet.html

Luckily unlike California there is no direct fault line under Long Island, although I wonder if there were and the Island sunk into the sea as a result of a big quake, would Long Island be the new Atlantis? Just silly food for thought.

The Southwest Border Area: Tricultural Development

The Southwest Border Area and Long Island have one thing in common, native americans.  The southwest border area has some of the most well known tribes in the United States, the Hopi, Navajo, Pueblo,  roamed this area long before the Spanish arrived exploring the deserts and canyons of this land. Much like the 13 tribes controlled all of Long Island before the Dutch and English settlers arrived and pushed them out and eventually onto reservations. Unlike the small reservations on Long Island, the Southwest Border Area has some of the largest reservations with very large populations that exist in the United States.

The conditions of the reservations in the Southwest Border Area and on Long Island are different. The reservations on Long Island are in relative poverty compared to the surrounding suburbs, but not extreme poverty that exists on the reservations of the Southwest. Examples of the differences are the tourism that the Long Island Indians have, that generates revenue, like the Shinnecock Indians and thier Annual labor day festival.

In comparison this is a great 7 part series about the Navajo Reservation and the people.

Now you can only learn so much by watching video clips of Indian Reservations. Growing up on Long Island I had the opportunity to visit the reservations often and learn about the culture and see the conditions that the people were living in. I have also been to the Navajo and Hopi reservations among others and seen the conditions first hand, and I can tell you it is a night and day differences. One of the biggest problems that causes this differnce is the lack of economic oppotunity for the Reservations of the Southwest. Unlike Long Island where the reservations are smack in the middle of a vibrant diverse economy with jobs and opportunities that are outside the reservations, many of the Native Americans in the Southwest Border area are on reservations that are proverbally in the middle of nowhere with little economic engines located nearby, and they have land that is arid, and not as useful as the reservations on Long Island. Farming is possible on Long Island, but in the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona this opportunity is not easily available. Perhaps the biggest difference is due to the fact that the Native Americans live on State Reservations not Federal Reservations like the Native Americans in the Southwest Border Area.

Just like Long Island originally belonged to the Dutch before it became part of the British Empire and a colony so too the Southwest Border Area was under the dominion of the Spanish Empire before becoming part of the United States.

The Empty Interior

The Empty Interior and Long Island have almost opposite physical features. With Long Island being very flat, the highest elevation being Jaynes Hill according to the NED, National Elevation Dataset, being 387 feet. In contrast to the Empty Interior with the massive Rocky Mountains, which dwarf the elevations on the east coast of the United States and Long Island. Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado is a great place to see parts of the Rockies.

Here is a great flight clip of the central rockies, if you compare it to the flight clips I have posted in an earlier Long Island post, the differences are astounding.

Other than the massive mountain ranges that contrast Long Island, there are a few things in common with The Empty Interior and Long Island. Tourism as a source of income being one of the biggest.  The many national parks spread throughout the Empty Interior, as well as Ski areas, and fishing spots bring quite a bit of money into an otherwise lessened economic zone, not to mention Las Vegas! Well Long Island has The Hamptons, Fire Island and many small villages steeped in local and regional history going back to the 17th century.

The Empty Interior can offer a variety of tourist attractions:

Here is just a little taste of what Long Island can offer tourists:

The Empty Interior was mostly populated by peoples of northern european decent, and many of the people of Long Island also share this common ancestry.

The Great Plains and Praries

Although similar in landscape that both areas have large flat expanses. Also believe it or not a very common sight is seen often in both areas. Cyclic funnels of air, known as Tornados in the Great Plains, Long Island has tons of Waterspouts, I guess it is only a tornado when it is over land. I have seen tons of these in the waters growing up on Long Island, and it is a very cool thing, it rains down seaweed and fish over the land nearby which is freaky.  Here are some videos of waterspouts in the Long Island waters.

Another big thing in common between Long Island and the Great Plains and Prairies is the fact that they both have huge aquifers. The Ogalala aquifer irrigates so much of the land in the Great Plains. On Long Island there are 3 major aquifers, the Upper Glacial Aquifer, The Lloyd Aquifer and the Magothy Aquifer. Unlike the Ogalala which is "fossil" water a million years old, the aquifers of Long Island are only in the thousands of years old. The Department of Environmental Conservation of New York has some great information on these aquifers: http://www.dec.ny.gov/lands/36183.html.