Joseph Kerski
speaker
638 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 1 Aug
Joseph Kerski’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The dry valleys on Antarctica, and again I encourage you to look up a photograph of the dry valleys.
When I was at USGS we actually made a map of the dry valleys as a USGS uh thematic map.
Fascinating.
The dry valleys on on Antarctica might not have had precipitation for
millions of years.
Wrap your mind around that one.
That's pretty amazing to think about.
Okay, that's our place for this episode, the wettest and driest places on planet Earth.
Our thought leader this episode is Pliny the Elder.
P L I N Y the Elder
If geography is really about everything in, above and under the earth, and if an encyclopedia is supposed to contain a comprehensive summary of information from a particular branch of knowledge, how could an encyclopedia be created on something as vast as geography?
Long before Google, Wikipedia, and Encyclopedia Britannica for that matter, Pliny the Elder did just that.
In seventy seven through seventy nine CE or AD, his naturalis historia or natural history was published as the first attempt to organize geographic knowledge into an exciting encyclopedia.
It has been described as one of the most important books ever to be published in Latin.
Describing what Pliny defined as the natural world or life, the work was so large that it took thirty seven books, organized in ten volumes to cover it all.
Imagine carrying that on your in your backpack.
Heh.
In his introduction, Pliny claims to cite one hundred authors of two thousand books, from which he claims to discuss twenty thousand topics.
Wow.
The topics were not limited to geography, they also covered history, astronomy, mathematics, ethnography, anthropology, human physiology, zoology, botany, agriculture, horticulture, pharmacology, mining, mineralogy, sculpture, painting, and precious stones.
Showing 281–300 of 638 · page 15 of 32
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