UCSB Geography alumnus Philip Dennison recently wrote the following note to the Geography Department in response to the August 24 article “Eartha: The World’s Largest Revolving/Rotating Globe”:
“The Geography News post on Eartha brought back some geographic memories for me. Eartha is a giant globe at the DeLorme headquarters in Yarmouth*, Maine, and lays claim to being the largest rotating globe in the world. My connection to Eartha came in 2005, about 2 weeks before I got married. I met my wife in 2002 while we were both students in the Department of Geography. Sommer Thorgusen was in the senior year of her Bachelor’s at the same time I was finishing my Ph.D. The next three years went by quickly and by spring 2005 we had decided to get married.
Professor Dar Roberts and I had scheduled field work for the week after my wedding (a fact that Sommer still mentions to this day), so Sommer and I took a pre-honeymooon trip to Maine before our wedding. On the last day of our trip, I insisted that we try to find Eartha. With only a vague idea of where Eartha resided, we drove into Yarmouth and were instantly trapped by the traffic surrounding Yarmouth’s annual Clam Festival. After an hour of searching through Yarmouth’s clam-jam, we found the DeLorme building and stood in witness to the awesome sight of Eartha. Two weeks later, we were married on the beach in Oxnard with several UCSB Geographers in attendance.
*PS: Yarmouth’s official town motto: ‘Our Latchstring Always Out.’ That’s Mainer for ‘Our door is always open, but not literally, because that would let the bird-sized mosquitoes inside.’”
Phil received his PhD in Summer 2003 (Committee: Dar Roberts, Chair, Joel Michaelsen, Keith Clarke, and Susan Ustin); his dissertation was titled “Measuring Vegetation Type, Biomass and Moisture for Integration into Fire Spread Models Using Hyperspectral and Radar Remote Sensing.” Phil is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Utah, where he teaches several remote sensing classes and studies remote sensing of vegetation and wildfire.
Editor’s note: Many thanks to Phil for sharing these tidbits and photos. Hopefully, other alumni will take heed and follow suit!
