Bryan Carlile on Cartography, Geology, and Hurricane Ike

"Growing up, while kids around me pretended to be soldiers and football stars, I was recreating the great adventures of discovery in my backyard."

As a child, Bryan Carlile, author of After Ike: Aerial Views from the No-Fly Zone (TAMU Press, 2009), imagined he was a member of the Lewis & Clark expedition, discovering new worlds and mapping virgin territories. Now,in his role as a geospacial technologies consultant, he combines geographic, temporal, and spacial information to assist in the planning, decision-making, and operational needs of many organizations.

It was this work that took him to the Texas coast in 2008 where he worked as a first responder, as Hurricane Ike swirled miles from the coast.

"Nature left me awestruck," Carlile writes on the Houston Museum of Natural Science "BeyondBones" blog. "Educating ourselves about nature and natural disasters is one of the most important things humans can do. Our planet is a precious resource and the more we learn about the way it works the more we can do to keep it healthy and happy."

Read more of Carlile's guest blog on "BeyondBones", and be sure to join him and an excellent line up of some of the region's top minds (including several TAMU Press authors) at the "Examining the Gulf Coast" symposium Jan. 21.

Guest speakers will include Jim Blackburn, author of The Book of Texas Bays; John B. Anderson, author of The Formation and Future of the Upper Texas Coast: A Geologist Answers Questions about Sand, Storms and Living by the Sea; Andrew Sansom, essayist on After Ike; and Abbey Sallenger, author of Island in a Storm: A Rising Sea, a Vanishing Coast, and the Nineteenth-Century Disaster of Îsle Dernière in Louisiana That Warns of a Warmer World (PublicAffairs Press).

Those in attendance will have the chance to win an aerial tour of Galveston Island, sponsored by Apex Helicopters!