- Supercontinent Pangaea + The Shifting of the Continents
- Brittanica // Wiki
- Single continent on earth 225 million yrs ago during Permian era
- C-shaped from N to S pole
- As volcanic activity, earthquakes, shifting molten rock & tectonic plates - broke up into to supercontinents, then eventually our modern seven ones w/ islands, etc
- How'd we get the himalayan mts? when india & eurasia collided
- Also, even as some landmasses broke up, some more formed via collisions
- Continental drift, over the years. Even Hawaii, right now is moving towards Japan at rate of 4 inches per year.
- B/c of plate tectonics, tithin the next 50 million years, Africa and Australia will merge with Eurasia to form a supercontinent that approaches Pangean proportions.
- Title of project is kind of misleading b/c there is no one "modern map" - there are hundreds of projections out there, and several commonly used models
- Map Projections
- Essentially the process of flattening a surface that is continually-curved into a plane
- All maps distort b/ca sphere can't be represented on a flat plane without distortion.
- Have to try to preserve the properties you're focusing on at the expense of others, while maintaining the spherical body
- Properties: Area, shape, direction, bearing, distance, scale
- Depending on purpose, some distortions are acceptable
- Some projections show areas accurately but distort distances or scales, for example; others preserve the shapes of countries but misrepresent their areas.
- Wiki on the art of map projection
- Infinite number of possible map projections b/c you can choose where you're going to distort
- Early world maps
- Wiki timeline
- Psalter world map, 1265: One of the ‘great’ medieval world maps, it is probably a copy of the lost map which adorned King Henry III's bedchamber in Westminster Palace from the mid-1230s.
- Until 16th cent, most maps had east on top, b/c it was where "paradise was located" - b/c that's where the sun rises
- Wiki timeline
- The Mercator Projection
- 1569 Mercator world map: Gerardus Mercator aimed to 'correct' the map to be more useful to 16th century sailors by constant bearing sailing courses on the sphere (rhumb lines) are mapped to straight lines on the plane map
- A conformal map projection: map small same size circles around the earth to small circles of varying sizes on the map. So the scale varies throughout the map, but is constant in every direction from any one point.
- Mapping Earth or trapping minds? The story of the Mercator projection
- In 1973, cartographer Arno Peters denounced Mercator projection as inaccurate, racist, remnant of colonialism (when white people went in and turned other land like India and Native Americans's land into their own property and took advantage of them)
- Distortion in northern hemisphere: N America & Eurasia bigger than actual proportion
- The developed world therefore ignored larger & poorer countries
- Like South America is actually like double the size of Europe, but you don't see that here. Alaska is def not supposed to be bigger than Mexico, Germany is NOT supposed to be so close to the middle.
- Why? Made Euro appear bigger for European sailors, who were focusing on sailing around Euro and needed to see more detail there
- It enlarges areas at pole to create straight lines of geographic direction, so it's easier to cross an ocean. And so they could draw a straight line from point A to point B there
- Not explicitly European domination, but yeah...kind of
- Still one of most common navigational tools internationally
- It's the basis for most of Google Maps
- The Gall-Peter model
- An equal-area map
- For those used to the Mercator projection find that on an equal-area map, the Northern Hemisphere looks “squashed”
- Since it made developing countries look bigger, social justice pundits and charitable organizations (like U.N. divisions) started supporting it and called for a ban of the Mercator model
- Since 1940s, cartographers had wanted gone b/c it was inaccurate and outdated
- Wiki
- The West Wing: Why Are We Changing Maps
- Other Projections
- Van der Grinten , Robinson Projection, or Winkel Tripel Projection
- Compromises between equal-area and conformal projections, show whole world at once. Nat'l Geo used to use them, in this order.
- Van der Grinten puts whole world in a circle, and very distorted at each pole
- Robinson turns each pole into a long line instead of single point, so distorts poles extremely. Uses gentle Meridian curves
- Winkely Tripel has least distortion (minimizes "tripel" distortions: area, direction and distance) and is most commonly used in classroom
- Mollweide projection
- Commonly used to depict global distribution and proportions of area
- Wiki
- Van der Grinten , Robinson Projection, or Winkel Tripel Projection
- Inaccurate representation of Africa
- Africa is about 14 times larger than Greenland and yet on the Mercator map are almost same size
- Kai Krause created infographic on the (true size of Africa): bigger than U.S, Japan, India, China, and all of Euro combined
- The Economist's response: a sphere can't be represented on a flat plane without distortion, so all map projections somehow distort. But we know this because we were paying attention at the beginning of the lecture, right?
- Many African countries have outdated boundaries. Africa contains 54 sovereign countries, most of which still have the borders drawn during the era of European colonialism.
- Why is this stuff important?
- Inaccurate projections such as the Mercator map can send conscious or unconscious messages to geography students about the relative importance of countries and their peoples.
- Our society unconsciously equates size with importance and power
- And equates placement with importance. Something more important should be on the top of the list, right?
- Australian cartographers made a few "corrective" maps. They also tend to have pacific-centered maps.
- The USSR, modern China & Japan placed themselves in center
- Medieval Euro - Jerusalem, holy land, on top
- Many U.S/Can maps split: Americas in the middle, China split in half, and Bangladesh and Bhutan almost lost in the margin.
- ref
- Equal-area maps (like Gall-Peters model) are much better for teaching about realistic illustrations of the world
mar 16 2013 ∞
mar 17 2013 +
mar 17 2013 +