Here at the GIS lab, we track a couple of elephants in Myanmar (Burma) and Sri Lanka using satellite transmitting GPS collars, and there’s a guy in over in Myanmar right now in the process of collaring 4 more elephants. The collars collect locational data from GPS satellites several times a day, and then once a day when a certain weather satellite passes overhead they transmit those coordinates. Every couple of days those coordinates get downloaded to the earth. I’ve temporarily taken over recieving and processing that data, so every two days I get an email with the latest positions of the elephants (or at least the collars) for processing.

In short, I get email from satellites now.

(sort of)

In case you were wondering, I’m still figuring out how to translate the data into maps, so I’m not totally sure what the elephant in Sri Lanka was doing during the tsunami. It was 20kms inland from the coast, I’m sure of that anyway, so it probably wouldn’t have bothered moving further inland even if it was capable of recieving infrasound warning of earthquakes.