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For people interested in the subject generally I highly recommend John McPhee's anthology "Annals of the Former World." Actually I highly recommend everything John McPhee has written but this is a good start :).
By jamincan 2026-02-0312:33 And if you manage to wade through that tome, Myron Cook's Youtube channel [1] is an excellent place to continue your exploration of geology.
References to his books should carry a warning - something to the effect of:
"may inspire circuitous road trips involving many stops dangerously examining road-cuts on busy interstate highways"
By jhundal 2026-02-0219:41 I would pay good money for a field guide/itinerary to accompany "Assembling California".
More directly related to the Green River, I found Wayne Ranney's "Carving Grand Canyon: Evidence, Theories, and Mystery" an accessible/engaging intro to deep geological mysteries.
By arethuza 2026-02-0216:27 I can also recommend: "The Earth: An Intimate History" by Richard Fortey
By OisinMoran 2026-02-0221:45 Can vouch for his “Oranges” too! A phenomenal writer
By mclaurin10 2026-02-0217:36 Second for John McPhee! Also Rising From the Plains.
By jonstewart 2026-02-032:05 I just finished Annals of the Former World. It's essentially a 700 page-long ode to geology, using scientific terms for their prosody as much as their meaning. I once saw someone else remark that "Rising from the Plains" was the greatest western ever written.
I used to think geology was a dumb science, but this book single-handedly made me obsessed with the topic. Geology is really more like "earth history" and it's a startlingly young field, a dynamic which plays out across the volumes.
Why does this article have a picture of the Maroon Bells? As opposed to something along Green River or, ideally, the 700m deep canyon being described?
By indoordin0saur 2026-02-0216:083 reply Having recently gotten into watching documentaries or youtube videos of accounts of mountaineering expeditions it's amazing how lazy content creators, film makers and journalists can be when choosing what images or videos to show. You'll get something about climbing a mountain in the Andes and keep getting shown completely misleading pictures of Himalayan mountains, etc.
The content you create is only as good as the stock footage you have available to you. It's not like these people are trekking to the locations to acquire their own content. If you search in stock libraries for mountaineering in the Andes, and it only brings you footage from the Himalayas you're just going to use it.
By QuadmasterXLII 2026-02-0222:54 plenty of them are traveling, and the extent to which you see videos of people putting together stock footage indicates failure of the algorithm. although at this point, the algorithm has failed hard enough that I am down to subscriptions and chronological feed.
Although, this larger structure did create one of my favorite internet algorithm outcomes: There is obviously intense hunger for authentic mountain videos narrated in a generic minecraft youtuber voice, and the resulting incentive gradient physically yeeted a minecraft youtuber to the top of mount everest (https://www.youtube.com/@RyanMitchellYT)
Simple, lazy stuff like that always drives me up the wall.
The HGTV show House Hunters used to be wildly inaccurate with their map location pins. On more than one occasion they'd say a couple is from the Bay Area but when they show the map the location pin would be in LA County. Like, come on. That's not even close.
There's a lot of duplicated geographic names in Northern and Southern California. If the production house isn't in the area, it's hard, close enough.
I lived in Burbank, but I was in the unincorporated area of Santa Clara County, not the incorporated city in LA County. Incidentally, I was living in the South Bay, but not the South Bay in LA County, or the South Bay in San Diego County.
Anyway, perhaps the couple is from the Bay Area, but their house is in LA County right now. :P
By PyWoody 2026-02-0219:36 A specific one that I'll never forget was actually a House Hunters International episode. It was years ago but the pin being off by about 400 miles burned it into my memory lol
I think they were moving from Market Street to Amsterdam.
By IncreasePosts 2026-02-0220:34 Clearly they're referring to the Santa Monica Bay Area
By dylan604 2026-02-0218:58 Maybe the pin was closer and they were lying about it being in the Bay Area???
Also, no need for exact location for these pins. The new home owners probably are fine with it not being exact
I think it's largely because they are "content creators" instead of trying to tell a story or share information.
By indoordin0saur 2026-02-0218:53 I'll notice this with TV documentaries and segments on news channels quite frequently as well. I have the "GeoGuessr gene" as well as being decently well travelled so I spot this stuff all the time. One particular pet peeve of mine is movies or shows mean to be shot in medieval Europe but the "forest" they use is actually a tree plantation of North American native trees such as Sitka Spruce.
By gus_massa 2026-02-0216:58 I was confused by the image too:
A few images: https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=4e98a81333b88c42&udm=2...
Map with elevation: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Gates+of+Lodore/@40.585090...
By legitster 2026-02-0218:29 > Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain
Using what they can from free, public domain sources.
By MarkusQ 2026-02-0217:16 Sadly, they "learned" it from us. People have been doing this sort of shoddy fill work since the dawn of television (and even earlier if you count wildly misplaced / inaccurate textual descriptions).
By terminalshort 2026-02-0217:28 Judging by the performance of AI agents at Geoguessr I suspect such errors are almost 100% humans:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/testing-ais-geoguessr-geniu...
By gwerbret 2026-02-0217:50 The actual paper (open access): https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
