To help celebrate Arizona’s centennial, there is a new web portal that “offers a tour of the people, places, and events that defined our past and are shaping our future. The Arizona Experience is your passport to Arizona’s hidden treasures. Interactive features allow you to customize your tour. Visit Arizona’s iconic landscapes, listen to the oral histories of descendants of early explorers, settlers, and miners, or discover how our leading innovations in biotechnology, alternative energy, and high-tech products are creating a promising tomorrow. Each month during the 2012 Centennial year will launch a new theme to showcase the 48th state.”

The theme for March is mining and minerals.  The features include:

Mining Arizona’s Metals – interactive map of active mines in Arizona, Morenci mine flyover, and surface and underground mining techniques slide show.

Rock Products – Building Arizona – interactive cement plant tour, map with  locations and mineral commodities of more than 300 quarries or mines, videos and photo gallery.

Featured Artist – World renowned mineral photographer Jeff Scovil presenting a photo gallery of some of his best images of Arizona minerals, as well as a short video on “how to photograph minerals”.

Miners Story – Video gallery of the men and women of San Manuel recounting their experiences living and working in one of Arizona’s historic mining communities.

H. Mason Coggin Photo Collection – Arizona historic mines and miners photo gallery.

The Arizona Experience is a dynamic, multimedia, 4D web environment with interactive maps, hundreds – soon to be thousands – of images, historical time-lines, flyovers of iconic landscapes, interviews with Arizona leaders, featured artists, hours of videos – onsite and at the Arizona Experience YouTube channel, and oral histories that capture the experiences of the men and women that shaped the state.

According to Dr. Michael Conway of the Arizona Geological Survey, “We used Microsoft Research’s new Layerscape visualization software to produce the 3D flyovers, and we worked closely with ESRI to broadcast interactive maps that incorporate spatial data, content, interactive timelines, and photo galleries.  These dynamic tools and extraordinary content are tailor made for teachers challenging their students to explore Arizona’s past, examine its present, and imagine its future.”

Take a few minutes to look over the home page, and sample the various features.  There is more to it than initially meets the eye.  There are lots of nooks and crannies that bring up very interesting material.

Click on http://arizonaexperience.org/ to start your tour.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2012 at 8:16 am and is filed under General Science, Geology, Miscellaneous Stories, Natural History, Politics. Tags for this post: Arizona experience, history, mining, people, places. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.