Lesson video

Hello, my name is Mr. Conway.

I'm very pleased to have this opportunity to guide you through today's geography lesson.

A particular focus for this lesson is going to be geographical information systems, which we sometimes call GIS.

So let's get started.

This lesson is part of the "Glacial Landscapes" unit, and by the end of today's lesson, the intention is that you'll be able to use GIS to visualise glaciated landforms in upland areas.

Some of the learning about GIS will be new to you, but I'm here to help you along the way.

To help us achieve the outcome, we need to learn or remind ourselves about a few important keywords.

These are the keywords for today's lesson: glacial landforms, oblique view, orientation, and pop-up.

Let's look at definitions for each of these keywords.

Glacial landforms are physical landscape features created by the action of glaciers during a period of glaciation.

They can occur in lowlands, uplands, and even on the sea floor, but in this lesson, we're focusing on upland glacial landforms. Oblique view means a view over a landscape from one side at an angle.

This is also known as perspective view.

Orientation, in this case, is the rotation of a map in different dimensions, two dimensions or three dimensions, to provide different viewpoints around the compass, so that we can get a perspective on what the landscape looks like almost as if you're flying over it.

Pop-up in GIS means a display of information about the attributes in a set of spatial data, and there could be a combination of text, or images, or charts.

And the pop-up is usually linked to a location which appears when you click a point on a 2D or 3D webmap to reveal the pop-up information.

Our first learning cycle addresses the question how can GIS visualise glacial landforms? And the second learning cycle is going to consider how GIS can visualise conflict in glaciated areas.

So we're now gonna look at the first of these learning cycles.

GIS can be used to visualise and analyse physical landscapes such as glaciated landscapes.

Many areas of the world have landscapes that were profoundly influenced by glaciation, particularly the most recent Quaternary glaciation, which is also known as the Pleistocene glaciation.

The UK is no exception, and we can see evidence of glaciation across the whole country in lowland as well as upland areas.

So what we're going to do is look at one of the upland areas, which is Northwest Wales, including Eryri, or Snowdonia, National Park.

In any area of upland glaciation, GIS can really help us to visualise the resulting landforms. We're going to use GIS to study glacial landforms in Northwest Wales, not only to visualise the physical features of the glaciated landscape, but also some ways that human uses of the landscape have had impacts, both positive and negative.

All over the world, in areas which have experienced significant glaciation processes, we see a whole array of glacial landforms which often create spectacular landscapes.

Glaciologists, who are the experts who study landforms created by glaciation, have found such strong similarities all over the world that it's possible to create theoretical models, such as this one, showing upland glacial landform.

Then, we can visualise these landforms to assess the extent to which a particular landscape aligns with these theoretical models.

We're going to see how GIS 3D webmaps and imagery, such as ArcGIS Online Scene Viewer, can help us to visualise the relief of a glaciated landscape, and in doing so, we'll use different oblique views by changing the orientation of the visualisations.

So let's see in this video clip how we can visualise the relief of upland glacial landform in Northwest Wales.

This scene presentation will provide a guide around Northwest Wales, and, in particular, the National Park Eryri, or Snowdonia, to show how we can use GIS, and, in particular, 3D webmaps and imagery to visualise the relief of a glaciated landscape.

A key question to have in mind is how closely do the glacial landforms of Northwest Wales correspond to the models that we see of glaciated features? We're going to use Scene's capacity to show a combination of satellite and mainly aerial imagery to take a tour of the glacial landforms in Northwest Wales.

Our views have been saved in Slide Manager, and you can see a list of the slides just here.

We're gonna look at them in presentation mode.

So we're gonna zoom in on the landscape, first of all, to take an oblique view, which means a view at an angle and not from above, looking at the landscape.

We zoom a little bit further, and you might begin to see some glacial landforms that might be familiar.

Then, we move to get our first view of the highest mountain in the area, Snowdon-Yr Wyddfa, looking north, and we get a better view of this magnificent mountain with its pyramidal peak in the next scene.

It owes its pyramidal shape to having been eroded by glaciers on at least three sides.

The erosion was done by corrie glaciers, and in between the corrie glaciers, we see aretes, and this is a famous arete called Crib Goch.

If we take a closer look at one of these corries, Llyn Glas, we can see an excellent corrie lip, which is trapping a lake, a corrie lake, or tarn, in the armchair-shaped hollow, which has become deepen by the corrie glacier.

Then, we can move on to the Nant Francon Valley which is one of the most magnificent U-shaped valleys anywhere.

And you can see running down the middle of the valley, we have a misfit stream, a stream that really wouldn't have had the power to carve out this valley.

It would've had to be done by quite a large glacier, which would've easily filled this valley completely.

If we could take a closer look at the valley sides, we can see several truncated spurs, so the glacier would've at least reached this height.

We might try to imagine how those spurs were interlocking spurs in the drainage of the landscape before glaciation, but the Nant Francon glacier would've chopped the ends off them.

That's what truncated means.

And in a similar way, further up the valley, we see how the truncation truncated whole valleys, and we're left with a hanging valley above Nant Francon valley now.

A little further upstream, we have another U-shaped valley, and this one has a ribbon lake in it called Llyn Ogwen.

And the Ogwen Valley provides a major transport route, because you can see the A5, which is the main road from London to Holyhead going through the valley, and that road has been there, at one shape or another, for about 2,000 years since Roman times.

On the same side as the road, there's a magnificent mountain called Tryfan.

And, at the base of that, we see some fantastic scree slopes which have been created by frost shattering.

So freeze-thaw action is taking place right up on those steep slopes, and the rocks are falling down, creating piles of debris at the bottom of the slope.

On the same side, a little further down, is a hanging valley called Cwm Idwal containing a fantastic corrie lake called Llyn Idwal.

It has a classic armchair shape created by the rotational movement of the corrie glacier which would deepen the hollow where the lake is now, and then created the lip which actually keeps the water from spilling out into the valley below.

Beyond the lake, we see the corrie back wall with very steep crags created by plucking by the corrie glacier.

Now, hopefully, you have a head for heights, because we're going to look at the back wall from above, and we can get some idea of just how steep that back wall is.

And this is where the plucking would've taken place by the corrie glacier.

So we've had a really good look at the North Wales landscape of glacial landforms. How closely do you think they align with the glacial landforms model? You'll soon have the opportunity to look at the Northwest Wales Scene yourself, which is gonna be similar to the one you saw in the demonstration.

But before we do that, let's just check up on some points from it.

The first question is, when using Slide Manager in 3D Scene Viewer, which of the symbols you can see in A, B, and C is the one we use to open or toggle the slide presentation? You may wish to pause the video here while you have a little think about that.

So the correct choice of icon corresponding to a slide presentation is the letter C.

It looks like a screen.

And the icon to close slide presentation, which I'm gonna show you now, is similar, but you can see it's got a small cross on the bottom right of the icon.

So that's for closing the presentation.

Now, let's look at another question.

Which is the best keyword to use for the view over a landscape from one side at an angle? You've got four possible choices.

Pause the video if you wish to think about that, and we'll be back in a moment.

So well done if you remembered that one of our keywords, which means the view over a landscape from one side at an angle, is answer C, the oblique view.

Now, for the task which will help you to use 3D Scene to visualise a glaciated landscape as we demonstrated in the video clip.

For task one, the link provided takes you to Northwest Wales Scene.

It's similar to the one you saw in the demonstration, but it's just got 10 slides numbered 1 through to 10.

Your challenge is to match the number of each slide with the glacial landforms shown in the table.

Task two asks you to think about the glacial landforms model to consider just how close the Northwest Wales landscape that you've looked at aligns with the model landscape.

And as a reminder, the model is reproduced here for this task.

So pause the video now to take some time to do task one and two, and when you're ready, press Play to obtain some feedback on these tasks.

We'll see you on the other side of the tasks.

Hopefully, you were able to undertake the tasks effectively.

For task one, you used the 3D Scene in the link to visualise the glaciated landscape of Northwest Wales, and match the slide numbers to the landforms in the table.

The correct matches were as follows: the arete was number two, the corrie and corrie lake was number nine, the corrie back wall, number 10, the corrie lip, number three, hanging valley was number six, then, the truncated spurs were number five, pyramidal peak, one, ribbon lake was number seven, scree slopes, number eight, and the U-shaped valley was number four.

For task two, you were asked to consider how close the Northwest Wales landscape aligns with the model landscape.

So did your opinions echo with any of these? Alex, for example, was impressed by the way that, "Northwest Wales has the whole range of glacial landforms in the model which are easy to spot since the glaciers melted." Good point.

Aisha pointed out that, "There are model glacial landforms around the U-shaped valleys such as corries, corrie lakes, hanging valleys, and truncated spurs." Good observations.

Sophia was presumably looking at the highest mountain in the area, which is Yr Wyddfa or Snowdon, when she said that, "The model pyramidal peak with corries on three sides is very easy to see using the oblique views in the 3D Scene." If your answers were very different, or you recognise some errors, take another look at the video presentation and the task presentation.

On the other hand, you may well have spotted some extra landforms. For example, the Nant Francon Valley is not only a U-shaped valley, it's also significant enough that we could describe it as a glacial trough.

Let's now look at our second learning cycle: how can GIS visualise glaciated area conflicts? In order to address this question, let's take a look at some of the ways that conflict may arise.

Glaciated areas can provide people with all kinds of economic opportunities.

For example, primary sector activities are common.

That is activities which grow, or extract, raw materials from the natural landscape such as the soil, water, or geological resources.

In Northwest Wales, for a very long time, certainly hundreds and probably thousands of years, the primary sector activities such as hill farming and slate quarrying have been very significant as part of the local economy.

These activities provided income, but they also had major impact on the landscape.

For instance, upland sheep farming has greatly modified glaciated landscapes from their natural appearance.

In much of the UK where there are hills and mountains, including Northwest Wales, hill farming with livestock grazing sheep and other animals has created landscapes which have very little truly natural vegetation.

Without such farming, these landscapes would largely be covered in temperate forests.

But it's also important to consider the smaller flora, not just trees, such as rare and endangered montane species that we find in areas of upland, species of mosses and lichens which may struggle to survive due to the sheep grazing and browsing.

The process of glaciation in upland landscapes usually expose the rocks and make them much more accessible to us, which is why the primary activity of quarrying is very common in such areas.

By the late 1800s, Wales, and in particular Northwest Wales, had become a world leader in slate quarrying.

Slate is a valuable metamorphic rock which has many uses including roof tiles.

One of the main reasons is because it's impermeable, so it doesn't really let any water through it.

It's very good at keeping rain out of houses.

So the slate industry boomed, and it dominated the economy of Northwest Wales in the 19th century.

After that, the industry went into decline, mainly because there were cheaper impermeable materials available such as concrete, or clay, asbestos, and even plastic.

But the slate industry had been successful for a long time, and consequently, the slate quarries really left their mark.

They had a very profound impact on the glaciated landscapes of Northwest Wales.

Conflicts had arisen because, although the slate industry had provided a lot of economic and social benefits for the local communities by way of employment, income, and the development of services such as schools, many people lamented the environmental impact such as the visual impact on the landscape which left big scars, and there was slight dust which polluted the air.

That wasn't very healthy.

So when the slate industry declined, the quarries were often abandoned, because it was either too expensive, or just impossible, to restore the landscape.

There was a lot of unemployment and quite a lot of economic hardship as a result.

So, due to the decline in demand for slate from Wales, many of the slate quarries closed, but, as often happened in places associated with old traditional industries, attitudes to them change over time.

And as the years went by, they gradually became perceived differently as an important part of the story of the landscape and local communities.

They have a legacy, and it's sometimes tinged with nostalgia about a bygone age.

This desire to look back on such landscapes means they're increasingly celebrated as places of industrial heritage.

In fact, the profile of Northwest Wales slate quarries has dramatically changed in recent years.

They're now officially considered to be a world-class resource, because in 2021, UNESCO, the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation, placed the whole area on their World Heritage list, describing it as The Slate Landscape of Northwest Wales.

That's its official UNESCO title.

This means that Northwest Wales slate quarries now have the same international status as places like Stonehenge and the Taj Mahal in India.

You can see a GIS webmap here which has been created by UNESCO showing all of the places on their World Heritage list, and there's a closeup of Northwest Wales as well.

As well as GIS being used to locate all of the UNESCO World Heritage sites, GIS has also been used to create and promote ways for local people and visitors to enjoy the landscape, the new Slate Landscape of Northwest Wales.

Consequently, where the area was once dominated by primary sector activities, the Heritage status means that tertiary sector activities, such as leisure and tourism, are taking over.

One example of this is the Snowdonia's Slate Trail.

It's a long-distance footpath, and it was established in 2017.

The trail links all of the sites of interest, all of the main quarries, and it's been carefully researched, recorded, and shared publicly using GIS.

In keeping with the celebration of industrial heritage, this 83-mile trail takes you on a journey back in time to when Snowdonia was the centre of the slate industry.

The idea is to provide a resource which will promote an educational appreciation of the area while encouraging people to improve their health and wellbeing while walking, or perhaps even running along the trail.

So the Snowdonia Slate Trail is now marked on Ordnance Survey maps of the area, as we can see here on an extract of the 1:25,000 OS map near Penrhyn Quarry, and it's been swiped with Esri's imagery layer in National Library of Scotland Maps.

Consequently, we can see the quarry has been repurposed, and this time, it's shown as a fun park called Zip World.

It's advertised as a place where unparalleled adrenaline venture meets heritage.

So, having once been a place of primary sector activity, the landscape is now characterised by leisure and tourism, which are, of course, tertiary sector activities.

But such developments may cause new conflict.

For example, some would argue that the job opportunities in leisure and tourism are often low paid and seasonal.

The development of leisure and tourism can encourage the purchase of properties as holiday homes, or second homes, and that can inflate house prices, and make them less affordable for local people.

We also need to remember this is an upland area, and as you might notice from the contours on the OS map, because the roads are very small and windy, even the main A5 road you can see here has a lot of bends in it to negotiate the hilly landscape.

So traffic congestion linked to leisure and tourism can be an issue to consider.

Now, how can we use GIS to visualise how the slate industry might be a source of conflict in Northwest Wales by visualising and configuring data and pop-ups in 3D Scene Viewer? The following video clip provides a step-by-step guide demonstrating how to do this.

In this video guide, we're going to consider aspects of the human geography of Northwest Wales using GIS to help visualise the impacts of human activity on a glacial landscape.

Human activity such as hill farming and slate quarrying has had a profound impact on the landscape of Northwest Wales.

In the past, the present, and the future, these activities have the potential to cause conflicts to arise about the way the glaciated landscape is used.

We're going to see how GIS can enable us to import some useful geospatial data to investigate the impact of slate quarrying in particular.

The visualisation of the data can then be improved by configuring symbology and pop-ups to show further information.

Using the Northwest Wales 3D Scene, we can exit presentation mode, then, we're gonna add a layer of geospatial data.

So we click Add, and in Browse Layers, we make sure that the dropdown says ArcGIS Online, because that's where we're going to look for this.

We type into Search, Northwest Wales Slate Landscape, and that should appear as a layer, which we can then add to our map by clicking Add plus.

And it should mean that some orange dots appear.

Now, if you don't see them to start off with, just scroll out, and you should be able to see that they're on the map.

Now, if the orientation of your map doesn't show North at the top, and you would prefer that, you simply click the small compass, and it'll orientate it to show North at the top.

The orange dots are defaults, and they're not all that easy to see.

So we click Done, and Layer Manager should appear.

If it doesn't, just merely click this button here.

Then, go to the new layer, Northwest Wales Slate Landscape, and find the small three dots.

Click on those, and then go to Layer Style.

This is gonna help us to change the symbols.

We click 2D Marker, Options, click the existing symbol, the orange dot that we want to change, then, there'll be an option for Basic Shapes, and I suggest you just choose the large circle, and click Done.

To change the colour of the circle, we click Colour, and select the colour.

We maybe choose yellow, and click Done.

And then click Done again twice.

So now we can clearly see where the quarries in the Northwest Wales Slate Landscape, as declared by UNESCO, are located.

But before we explore them in more detail, we're gonna make sure that, when we click those dots, there's more powerful information.

So we click the layer itself, three dots, and this time, click Layer Properties.

And in the pop-up section, click Configure Pop-ups.

And in the panel that opens, there's one section called Title.

In Title, delete the typing that's there already, it's defaulting to the title of the layer, and, instead, we're going to select one of the titles from the attributes in the layer.

So we click these curly brackets to find those.

In the curly brackets, there's a whole list of the attributes that are in the layer, and the one we want is the name of the Slate community.

So we go to that one, and we click Slate Community.

What that will do is pick out the actual name that's listed in the spreadsheet that sits behind the layer.

Now, we could pick all sorts of other attributes to show, which are shown in this field list, there's a whole load of them here, and some of them are appearing here on the right.

But we're gonna keep it simple, and, basically, delete them for the moment, and click Add Content instead.

And we're gonna add an image from the layer.

So we click Image.

Where it says Enter URL, we go to the curly brackets, as we did before.

I'm gonna search for a layer called Image URL 1, and you can see that there are several of those image URLs, but we want this one that says Image URL 1.

We click that, and then click Done three times.

And what this has achieved, has created pop-ups that show us the title of each of the slate quarries with a nice photograph of each one.

And we can see them by clicking on each of the dots.

And then, we're in a position to explore them in more detail.

And then, we're gonna save our work.

This is already a scene that's been saved, but you're gonna save it as your own by clicking Save As New Scene.

Give it a title, let's say Northwest Wales, I'm going to just add DEMO 1, because I'm demonstrating it to you, and then we click Save.

We're then in a good position to have a look at some of these quarries in a bit more detail.

If you click on the pop-up, only can you see the name and a photograph of it.

You can zoom to it, and you can have a look at it in some detail, and we get some idea of the impact on the landscape.

And if we move further north, remembering that if we need to reorientate the map to North, we just click the compass symbol.

So we can use a combination of pan and zoom to explore some of the quarries, such as Dinorwig, and we can zoom to it, and have a little look to what impact the quarrying of slate had on the landscape.

And we can get a very good idea of just how significant that was using the pan and zoom controls.

Of course, many of the quarries have now closed, but they are now celebrated increasingly for their industrial heritage.

So there are all kinds of activities that take place in the quarries.

And a particularly interesting leisure activity which uses the slate quarries is a long-distance footpath.

And there's a layer built into your map, which you can switch on clicking the visibility symbol, and that is the Snowdonia Slate Trail.

And GIS was used to plan the trail, so it went as close as possible to the quarries, and it could be used to follow it too, so that people can explore them, and walk along the whole route, or some of the route.

And that is clearly marked on Ordnance Survey maps.

Soon, you'll have a chance to use the Northwest Wales 3D Scene, just as you saw in the demonstration.

But first, let's check your learning by looking at a couple of common misconceptions.

Firstly, in Layer Manager, after clicking the three dots on a layer in 3D Scene, what should we click next to change a symbol? Is it, A layer properties, B, layer style, or C, zoom to? You may wish to pause the video, and restart it when you've selected your answer.

Hopefully, you chose layer style.

Well done if that was the case.

Now, let's look for the second check.

When configuring pop-ups, which type of brackets shown in A, B, C, and D need to be clicked to select data attributes for the pop-up? Pause the video here if you wish to restart it when you've selected your answer.

Well done if you chose B, the curly brackets.

That's the way to go if you want to select data attributes to appear in a pop-up.

Now, for the tasks.

The first task will help you to import and configure data and pop-ups in 3D Scene Viewer about the Northwest Wales Slate Landscape.

It provides you with all the steps you need, so be careful not to miss any of them out.

Task two has three components where you are using the GIS work you've done to analyse and evaluate conflict about the slate landscape past and present, and then to reach some conclusions.

So see you on the other side of the tasks.

Hopefully, the tasks worked well for you.

For task one, you need to import and configure data and pop-ups in 3D Scene Viewer about the Northwest Wales Slate Landscape.

Hopefully, your scene ended up looking something like this.

And you can see that we've clicked the Slate Landscape to show the site at Penrhyn, and that gives us some idea of how the pop-up should appear.

For task 2A, you were asked to outline how GIS supports UNESCO's Northwest Wales designation.

So a good answer would point out that GIS is used to locate all of the UNESCO World Heritage sites on a world map, and GIS is also used to create and promote the Snowdonia Slate Trail long-distance footpath, including OS maps.

For task 2B, you're asked to explore and evaluate the Northwest Wales Slate Landscape and Snowdonia's Slate Trail, and to suggest possible negative and positive impact of the slate quarries.

Well, for slate quarries in the past, when fully active, negative impacts would've included the environmental impact on the landscape of all the slate quarrying, and quality of life which would've been impacted by visual pollution created by the scarring of the landscape by the quarries.

And there would've also been air pollution due to the slate dust in the atmosphere.

But there would've been positive economic benefits too, such as employment and income, and social benefits with services such as schools, or medical facilities.

Then, for slate quarries in the present day, as industrial heritage, some environmental impacts remain.

There would be people who would still have a negative reaction to the scarred landscape, and there would be some objections to leisure and tourism due to the impact on house prices, and perhaps increase in traffic congestion.

However, all of these things can be balanced against economic and social benefits for tertiary sector employment, such as leisure and tourism, and, of course, the associated health and wellbeing benefits such as exercise, people walking and running along the trails, and the education enrichment gained by learning more about the industrial heritage of the slate industry.

Finally, for task C, you were asked to draw conclusions from this GIS investigation.

How effectively might initiatives such as the UNESCO Northwest Wales Slate Landscape manage conflicts in this glaciated area? And your conclusions might have included points such as the following.

The Northwest Wales Slate Landscape quarries have left a significant visual legacy.

Landscape restoration will be very expensive and difficult to say the least.

The UNESCO World Heritage designation of Northwest Wales Slate Landscape celebrates the industrial heritage, very much raises the area's profile, and increases tertiary sector employment, leisure and tourism in particular.

So support for local services will follow, hopefully, medical and transport services.

Local people and visitors will now have opportunities to enjoy the landscape to become fitter and healthier, that's a social benefit, for example, walking and running, and more educated about the industrial heritage, another social benefit.

However, many of the tertiary sector jobs can be seasonal with low pay, and there can be conflicts between tourists and the local community, such as increased house prices due to holiday homes and footpaths across farmland with livestock.

Well done, we've covered a very wide range of GIS knowledge and skills, and I highly recommend that you return to them, and practise them, so that your GIS capabilities can become fluent.

So here's a summary of our learning today.

GIS can be used to visualise glacial landforms of the physical geography of upland areas.

GIS can also be used to assess the extent to which a particular landscape aligns with a theoretical model of a glaciated landscape.

And GIS can be very helpful when changing the orientation of a 3D map using oblique views.

Data about industrial heritage in glaciated areas can be visualised and configured with pop-ups to analyse conflicts.

So we've covered a lot of GIS knowledge and skills in this lesson.

Excellent work.

Hopefully, you've found that interesting and useful, and I look forward to further learning together in another lesson.

So all the best, and bye for now.