This interactive map
shows how much plastic is found in the world's oceans. Most of the
plastic comes from rubbish dumped into rivers, which is then carried
into the sea (Credit: Dumpark)
Map visualises the estimated concentration of floating plastic waste in the world's oceans
Densities of plastic are shown as white dots around the map, each of which represents 20 kilograms (44lbs)
Eight million tonnes of plastic is dumped into our oceans every year, endangering marine and human life
The map was created to underline the issue of plastic pollution and encourage people to take action
As much as 8 million tonnes of plastic is dumped into our oceans every year, endangering marine life and, if it enters the food chain, endangering humans too.
Now, an interactive map has revealed where the 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic adrift in our oceans end up.
Densities of plastic are shown as white dots around the map, each of which represents 20 kilograms (44 lbs) of damaging ocean waste.
In the Sailing Seas of Plastic map, graphic designers at New Zealand-based data firm Dumpark visualised the estimated concentration of floating plastic debris in the world's oceans.
When zoomed out, the map seems to show that plastics in the ocean are large floating landfills, 'but as you zoom in you realise the complexity of the issue: The ocean is quite a vast surface, and similar to a starry night, there are a lot of little bright dots,' said map researcher Mr Laurent Lebreton.
The graphic reveals that the North Pacific Ocean suffers the most from plastic pollution, with an estimated 2 trillion individual pieces adrift in its waters.
This works out at around 87 million kilograms (193 million lbs) of waste in total, nearly one third of plastic pollution in all oceans.
Much of this waste is focused around China and Japan, tracing the North Pacific gyre, one of Earth's five major gyres, which are powerful circular ocean current systems caused by wind patterns and the rotation of the Earth.
The map shows that the Indian Ocean is a hot spot for global plastic pollution, with 1.3 trillion pieces of floating plastic.
Previous research has shown that as much as 60 per cent of the world's plastic waste comes from just five countries: China, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand.
This is likely the reason the North Pacific and Indian Oceans are so heavily polluted, as gyres carry waste outwards from the coasts of these nations.
The map is based on a study titled 'Plastic Pollution in the World's Oceans' from oceanographer Dr Marcus Eriksen.
According to the study, there are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic in our oceans, enough to circulate our equator 425 times.
Dr Eriksen and his team went on 24 nautical expeditions between 2007 and 2013 across all five of the Earth's major gyres.
Densities of plastic are shown as white dots around the graphic, each of
which represents 20 kilograms (44 lbs) of damaging ocean waste
When zoomed out, the map seems to show that plastics in the ocean are
large floating landfills, 'but as you zoom in you realise the complexity
of the issue.
The ocean is quite a vast surface, and similar to a
starry night, there are a lot of little bright dots,' said map
researcher Mr Laurent Lebreton.
Pictured is the amount of plastic waste
found in the Atlantic Ocean
The researchers took in 680 loads of plastic on their trip and noted down 891 visual assessments of floating waste, then crafted a statistical model to work out how plastic is spread around the world's oceans.
They found that, when added up, all of the ocean's plastics weigh more than 38,000 African elephants.
'The plastic industry suggests the only solution is through our own efforts — recycling, incineration, responsible personal waste management,' Dr Eriksen told Vox.
The graphic reveals that the North Pacific Ocean (pictured) suffers the
most from plastic pollution, with an estimated 2 trillion individual
pieces of plastic adrift in its waters
The map shows that the Indian Ocean is a hot spot for global plastic
pollution, with 1.3 trillion pieces of floating plastic.
Previous
research has shown that as much as 60 per cent of the world's plastic
waste comes from just five countries: China, Indonesia, Philippines,
Vietnam, and Thailand (pictured)
'But the reality is that the industry itself needs a design overhaul - they should strive to recover 100 per cent of their products, or make them 100 per cent environmentally harmless.'
Dr Eriksen and his team also investigated what types of plastic were polluting the oceans most.
'We found an astounding number of those little balls in deodorant roll-ons,' he said.
'The bigger items tend to be solid plastic: Toothbrushes, army men, bouncy balls, milk jugs, buckets...'
The map is based on a 2014 study in which a team of oceanographers went
on 24 nautical expeditions between 2007 and 2013 across all five of the
Earth's major gyres.
Pictured is the field locations where count
density (right) was measured for different sizes of plastic fragments
(bottom left of each grid)
This image shows the numbers (right) of different sizes of plastic
fragments (bottom left of each grid) that the team found.
Red indicates a
high density while green shows a low density.
The team took in 680
loads of plastic on their trip and noted down 891 visual assessments of
floating waste, then crafted a statistical model to work out how plastic
waste is spread
But the researchers said that most of the pieces of plastic they found was in confetti-sized shreds.
Of the 5.25 trillion particles Dr Eriksen's team calculated, 92 per cent are microplastics, either broken-up bits of larger plastic items, or small pieces like facial scrub microbeads.
'Most of these microplastics are so small you can't really tell what they are,' Dr Eriksen said.
'You drag a net through the ocean and come up with a handful of plastic confetti - particles the size of fish food.'
A newly formed volcanic cone between the Tonga islands of Hunga Tonga
and Hunga Ha‘apai erupts on 15 January 2015, releasing dense,
particle-rich jets from the upper regions and surges of water-rich
material around the base.
The monthlong Hunga eruption created a new
island that is now the subject of study and promises to reveal new
aspects of the region’s explosive volcanic past.
Credit: New Zealand
High Commission, Nuku’alofa, Tonga
A recent volcanic eruption near Tonga in the southwest Pacific created a new island, giving scientists a rare opportunity to explore the volcanic record of this remote region.
In late December 2014, an undersea volcano erupted between two small islands in the Tonga volcanic arc northeast of New Zealand, sending steam and dense ash plumes high into the air.
By the time the eruption ended about 5 weeks later, a new island had formed, eventually bridging the gap between the original islands.
Winds and ocean waves then began rapidly reshaping the newly emerged volcanic cone.
Ten months after the eruption, we visited the new island, which we unofficially nicknamed Hunga Island.
There, we attempted to characterize the volcanology of the eruption, begin tracking the rate of erosion on the new island, and assemble a history of volcanism in this region of the southwest Pacific.
Our findings reveal a shallow submarine volcanic caldera adjacent to the new volcanic island, and they highlight how incomplete the volcanic record can be at remote oceanic volcanoes.
Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha‘apai with the GeoGarage platform
(Linz nautical chart & CNES imagery 2017)
Signs of Eruption
The uninhabited islands of Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha‘apai lie 65 kilometers north of Nuku‘alofa, the capital city of the Kingdom of Tonga. Between 19 December 2014 and 28 January 2015, residents of Nuku‘alofa witnessed several large volcanic plumes rising from an eruption in the direction of the two islands [Global Volcanism Program, 2015], as seen in the news video below.
Newly awakened Hunga Ha'apai volcano creates large new Tongan island.
The plumes were the result of an explosive interaction between seawater and magma rising from a plateau about 150 meters below the ocean surface.
The plateau is part of Hunga, a massive, submerged volcanic edifice that rises more than 2000 meters from the surrounding seafloor and the site of volcanic activity as recently as 1988 and 2009 [Global Volcanism Program, 2009].
The 2014–2015 Hunga eruption deposited material between the islands of Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha‘apai, initially creating an isolated third island before connecting with Hunga Ha‘apai.
In less than 3 weeks, the eruption built up a circular area of land with a diameter of about 2 kilometers and a height of 120 meters.
This oblique aerial view shows the new Hunga cone and crater on 6
November 2015, stretching between the islands of Hunga Ha‘apai and Hunga
Tonga (top).
The crater rim is about 550 meters in diameter.
Credit:
Brendan Hall
A Violent Volcano Under the Sea
Hunga Ha‘apai, Hunga Tonga, and a reef to their south sit on the rim of a submarine caldera known as Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai.
The islands and reef are the only surface features betraying the presence of the largely submerged Hunga volcano (Figure 1).
Fig. 1. Water depth measurements show the Hunga edifice on which the
islands of Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha‘apai lie. Neighboring volcanoes
include the active Metis Shoal.
The inset shows the Tonga archipelago’s
location within the Kermadec-Tonga volcanic arc at the boundary between
the Pacific Plate and the Indo-Australian Plate.
Credit: Shane Cronin
Hunga volcano is one of many volcanoes in the Tonga-Kermadec volcanic arc that formed in response to subduction of the Pacific Plate beneath the Indo-Australian Plate.
Many highly explosive eruptions along this chain have had significant regional consequences [see, e.g., Caulfield et al., 2011].
These occurrences suggest that Hunga volcano may itself have had a similarly violent past.
Past research indicates that radiating, outward dipping lava flows and pyroclastic deposits on the two older Hunga islands represent small remnants of the rim of a very large volcano surrounding a caldera structure [Bryan et al., 1972].
This volcano may have suffered catastrophic collapse or prolonged erosion, obscuring it from view.
A nautical chart recently created for Nishinoshima island has fallen behind the growth of the real island.
The red curves on the center left of the island, apart from contour lines, indicate the locations of pre-eruption coastlines.
In November 2015, we conducted a land and ocean survey of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai and the new island.
Our goals were to characterize the recent eruption and collect baseline quantitative topographic data for tracking erosion rates.
We also wanted to assemble a longer history of the area’s volcanic and tsunami activity by surveying the older Hunga islands and surrounding shallow waters.
On the new island, we discovered that coarse deposits from falling water-rich jets of pyroclastic rock fragments form the lower beds of the cone, consistent with videos and photos of the eruption in progress.
Where waves have cut into the shoreline, the pyroclastic deposits appear poorly consolidated and poorly sorted.
The upper part of the cone is steeper and reflects a gradual “drying” (decrease in water interaction with magma) of the eruption as it proceeded.
This upper region is made up of thin, fine-grained beds of ash deposits, interspersed with ash-dominated sediments typical of lateral currents of particles, air, and steam.
The cone reached its maximum diameter by 7 January 2015 but continued to increase in height over the next 2 weeks.
Once the vent was completely surrounded by pyroclastic deposits, much higher eruption columns began.
Such Surtseyan eruptions—from a shallow sea or lake water—have only rarely been witnessed since the phenomenon was first seen during the formation of Surtsey, Iceland, in 1963 [Kokelaar, 1983].
A new crater lake sits atop the Hunga cone, created in the recent eruption between the islands of Hunga Ha‘apai and Hunga Tonga in the Tonga volcanic arc.
Credit: Marco Brenna
Rilling
of the island’s surface—forming dendritic erosion patterns—started
during the cone growth, but it accelerated with rainfall once the
eruption ceased. In addition, wave erosion began to rapidly attack the
base of the island.
Wave erosion was strongest on the southern side of
the cone, exposed to the southeast trade winds and associated ocean
swells.
There, the island has shrunk by more than 500 meters from its
initial posteruption shore, leaving 40-meter-high collapsing cliffs.
Strong rilling and gullying of the fresh volcanic material making up the
new island that abuts Hunga Ha‘apai underscore the rapid rate of
erosion in the area.
Coastal erosion has cut into the initial
posteruption shore by more than 500 meters, leaving 40-meter-high
collapsing cliffs on the island’s south side.
Author Shane Cronin stands
near a large gully.
Credit: Marco Brenna
In the 2.5 years since its formation, the primary volcanic cone lost about 40% of its original footprint, which spanned roughly 8 square kilometers.
However, the island has remained roughly the same in overall area because erosion has been matched by long-coast redisposition of the volcanic material in beach bars, altering the island’s shape.
Taking Samples
Shortly after the eruption, we carried out a photogrammetric survey using a drone and real-time kinematic GPS control points to provide a baseline for future monitoring.
We collected samples to chemically characterize the new volcanic material and compare it with deposits of the broader volcano.
On the older Hunga Ha‘apai islands, we found welded pumice-rich ignimbrite units and nonwelded pyroclastic flow deposits, laid down by superheated flows of gas and particles.
Such deposits attest to past huge explosive eruptions from this long-lived volcano.
One pyroclastic flow deposit contained charcoal, which we dated to the period 1040–1180 CE.
This deposit correlates closely in age and chemistry to ashfall deposits found on Tongatapu Island, 65 kilometers to the southwest [Cronin, 2015].
It also corresponds, within uncertainty bounds, to an unknown tropical eruption in 1108 CE that produced more than 1°C of global cooling [Sigl et al., 2015].
Seafloor Mapping
We also mapped the seafloor surrounding the new island at a resolution of about 1 meter using a WASSP® multibeam sounder.
Fig. 2. A bathymetric sonar survey of the seafloor near the islands of
Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha‘apai, conducted in November 2015, shows the
summit platform of the submerged Hunga volcanic edifice.
The dashed
black line outlines a previously undocumented caldera, which lies 150 to
180 meters below the surface.
Traces of past eruptions along the
caldera rim are clearly visible; the inset gives the locations of the
1988 eruptions in greater detail.
Areas colored white represent depths
greater than 200 meters, beyond the range of the sonar system.
Credit:
Simon Barker
The seafloor survey revealed a large closed depression to the south (Figure 2), consistent with the caldera postulated by Bryan et al. [1972].
The depression is approximately 150 meters deep and measures about 4 × 2 kilometers, with its northern and southern portions filled by younger volcanic deposits.
A broad, shallow area is associated with the 2009 eruptions south of the island formed in 2015 and a chain of cones formed in 1988 to the southeast.
Numerous other cones surround the rim of the caldera.
The caldera likely formed when an older Hunga edifice collapsed violently into the sea.
This collapse may be the source of the unknown South Pacific eruption about 1000 years ago.
Next Steps
Our first observations highlight how rapidly new volcanic forms are eroded in this area and imply that the volcanic record in the Tonga region is extremely fragmentary.
In future visits, we will continue investigating past eruptions while extending submarine surveys and sampling around the new island to monitor the ongoing changes in response to storms and other events.
A traditional Polynesian voyaging canoe has returned to Honolulu in Hawaii, completing the first-ever round-the-world trip by such a vessel.
The boat, the Hokule'a, took three years to journey around the globe.
Hawaiian Hokule'a canoe makes it round the world
The Hokulea’s mission: To inspire people to take care of “island Earth.”
Its crew navigated without modern instruments, using only the stars, wind and ocean swells as guides.
They aimed to use the same techniques that brought the first Polynesian settlers to Hawaii hundreds of years ago.
Hawaii celebrated the Hokule'a's homecoming on Honolulu's Magic Island peninsula.
Built in the 1970s, it has travelled around 40,000 nautical miles (74,000km) on this latest trip, known as the Malama Honua voyage, meaning "to care for our Island Earth".
Its aim has been to spread a message about ocean conservation, sustainability and protecting indigenous culture.
"Hokule'a has sparked a reawakening of Hawaiian culture, language, identity and revitalized voyaging and navigation traditions throughout the Pacific Ocean," said the voyage organisers on their website.
Navigator Kala Baybayan Tanaka and Capt. Timi Gilliom consult a nautical
chart of Ka‘ie‘iewaho Channel on a sail from Oahu to Kauai to
commemorate the launching of Namahoe, Kauai’s first voyaging canoe, in
September. Kaipo Ki‘Aha photo
Naalehu Anthony, crewmember and chief executive director of Hawaiian media company Oiwi TV which documented the trip, told Hawaii Public Radio that wherever they docked, people greeted them with a Hawaiian "Aloha" greeting.
"One of the things I really admire about the voyage, looking back on it, is that we always asked the first nations peoples from these different places for permission to come. We never said we are coming. We said, would it be OK for us to come and honour the native people of this place," he said.
The voyage, he added, had been an "opportunity to celebrate native knowledge and look at ways that we are more common than we are different".
The 35th America’s Cup is now history and it ended, as the poet T.S. Eliot once wrote, “Not with a bang but a whimper.”
A whimper from a thoroughly defeated Oracle Team USA who simply could not rise to the occasion.
As I have always said, a little bit of extra boat speed can make you look like a tactical genius and Emirates Team New Zealand had boat speed to burn.
ETNZ could sail deeper downwind and higher upwind while maintaining the same speed as OTUSA and that, my friends, is how you win boat races.
How the team was preparing after the disappointment of 2013.
This is their story of redemption.
So let’s congratulate Peter Burling and his team.
They did a fine job and are deserved winners of the America’s Cup, but just a quick little aside.
The next time I hear a commentator refer to Mr Burling as the “young” Peter Burling there will be some blood letting.
Ferchristsake Horatio Nelson was just 20 when he took on his first command of the Royal navy.
But I digress.
Last week I wrote a piece about ETNZ secret potion being an intense National Pride, but I was wrong.
Their secret ingredient was the man not at the helm of the boat, but at the helm of the entire operation and I am talking about my old mate Grant Dalton, or Dalts as most people call him.
Photo credit Onne van der Wal.
We raced together in the 81/81 Whitbread Round the Race, not on the same boat, but all of us racing back in those days were a merry band of brothers.
Dalts was a tousled haired, mustachioed, unassuming person who was quick with a laugh and even quicker with a beer.
I had no idea that he would rise to become one of the most powerful people in sailing and I am guessing that he also had no idea how successful his career would be, but maybe I am wrong.
Dalton’s career was for a long time in the shadow of Peter Blake, the Kiwi superstar who captured the imagination of the New Zealand public by winning the Whitbread and the America’s Cup.
Blake was tall and smooth; Dalton not so much and definitely not smooth.
Blake was knighted for his contribution to sailing.
Let’s see if the Queen nods in the direction of Dalton who surely deserves it, but I think that some of his public comments over the years may disqualify him.
Dalton was never politically correct and he certainly had firm opinions on some issues.
I am thinking of one comment leveled toward the first ever all-female team to race in the Whitbread.
It was the 89/90 Whitbread when Tracy Edwards led her crew aboard Maiden.
Dalton famously stated that if an all-female team ever won a leg of the Whitbread he would shove a pineapple up his arse and walk down Queen Street, the main street in Auckland.
Edwards won the second leg of that race into Fremantle, Australia and to this day none of us is sure whether Dalton kept his word on that one or not.
At the heart of every successful effort you need strong leadership and Grant Dalton has provided the absolute best kind of leadership.
He leads from the front and inspires by example.
It took him four attempts, two as crew and two as skipper, before he won the Volvo Ocean Race, but in the 1993/94 race he dominated aboard New Zealand Endeavour winning three of the six legs and taking the overall win.
He went on to race in three more Volvo Ocean Races before hanging up his oilies and turning his eye toward the America’s Cup.
Dalton led the charge to win the Cup in San Francisco in 2013 and we all know how that ended, but what most don’t know was how close the whole operation came to closing down after that loss.
Much of their backing comes from the New Zealand government and with such a dramatic loss the NZ public were rightfully less interested in chucking piles of money their way.
But Dalton is nothing if not a scrapper.
In 2015 he chose to axe helmsman Dean Barker and replace him with Peter Burling, a move that at the time had many calling for Dalton himself to be fired but let’s admit it, in hindsight, it was pure genius.
It also didn’t help Team New Zealand when Bermuda was announced as the host of the upcoming AC. New Zealand viewed Bermuda as a commercial wasteland.
Through it all Grant Dalton managed to keep it together and the rest, as they say, is history.
So I was very happy when Emirates Team New Zealand closed out the Cup yesterday and I was even more pleased to see Dalton on board one of the most sophisticated sailboats in the world wearing a pair of flip flops, or jandals as the Kiwis like to call them.
My kind of guy and let’s hope that the Queen can forgive him for a few of his less than noble comments over the years.
Last spring, a 23-year-old woman was driving her car through the Ontario town of Tobermory.
It was unfamiliar territory for her, so she was dutifully following her GPS.
Indeed, she was so intent on following the device that she didn’t notice that her car was headed straight for Georgian Bay—so she drove down a boat launch and straight into the frigid water.
She thankfully managed to climb out and swim to shore, as her bright red Yaris sank beneath the waves.
Accidents like this have become weirdly common.
In Manhattan, one man followed his GPS into a park, where his car got stuck on a staircase.
And in Europe, a 67-year-old Belgian woman was led remarkably astray by her GPS, turning what was supposed to be a 90-mile drive to Brussels into a daylong voyage into Germany and beyond.
Amazingly, she just patiently followed the computer’s instructions, instead of relying on her own common sense, until she noticed the street signs were in Croatian.
You can laugh, but many of us have stopped paying attention to the world around us because we are too intent on following directions.
Some observers worry that this represents a new and dangerous shift in our style of navigation.
Scientists since the 1940s have argued we normally possess an internal compass, “a map-like representation within the ‘black box’ of the nervous system,” as geographer Rob Kitchin puts it.
It’s how we know where we are in our neighborhoods, our cities, the world.
Is it possible that today’s global positioning systems and smartphones are affecting our basic ability to navigate?
Will technology alter forever how we get around?
Most certainly—because it already has.
Three thousand years ago, our ancestors began a long experiment in figuring out how they fit into the world, by inventing a bold new tool: the map.
One of the oldest surviving maps is, ironically, about the size and shape of an early iPhone: the Babylonian Map of the World.
A clay tablet created around 700 to 500 B.C.
in Mesopotamia, it depicts a circular Babylon at the center, bisected by the Euphrates River and surrounded by the ocean.
It doesn’t have much detail—a few regions are named, including Assyria—but it wasn’t really for navigation.
It was more primordial: to help the map-holder grasp the idea of the whole world, with himself at the center.
A facsimile of the world map by Eratosthenes (around 220 BC).
Eratosthenes is the ancient Greek mathematician and geographer attributed with devising the first system of Latitude and Longitude.
He was also the first know person to calculate the circumference of the earth.
This is a facsimile of the map he produced based on his calculations.
The map shows the routes of exploration by Nearchus from the mouth of the Indus River (325 BC, after the expedition to India by Alexander the Great), and Pytheas (300 BC) to Britannia. Place names include Hellas (Greece), Pontus Euxinus (Black Sea), Mare Caspium (Caspian Sea), Gades (Cadiz), Columnæ Herculis (Gibraltar), Taprobane (Sri Lanka), Iberes (Iberian peninsula), Ierne (Ireland), and Brettania (Britain), the rivers Ister (Danube), Oxus (Amu Darya), Ganges, and Nilus (Nile), and mountain systems.
The map shows his birthplace in Libya (Cyrene), the Egyptian cities of Alexandria and Syene (Aswan) where Eratosthenes made his calculations of the earth's circumference, and the latitudes and longitudes of several locations based on his measurements in stadia.
Place Names: A Complete Map of Globes and Multi-continent, Europa, Libya, Asia, India, Scythia, Arabi
“There was something almost talismanic, I think, about having the world in your hand,” says Jerry Brotton, a professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary University of London who specializes in cartography.
Indeed, accuracy wasn’t a great concern of early map-drawers.
Maps were more a form of artistic expression, or a way of declaring one’s fiefdom.
Centuries later, the Romans drew an extensive map of their empire on a long scroll, but since the map was barely a foot high and dozens of feet wide, it couldn’t be realistic.
It was more of a statement, an attempt to make Rome’s sprawl feel cohesive.
The first great attempt to make mapping realistic came in the second century A.D. with Claudius Ptolemy.
He was an astronomer and astrologer obsessed with making accurate horoscopes, which required precisely placing someone’s birth town on a world map.
“He invented geography, but it was just because he wanted to do better horoscopes,” notes Matthew Edney, a professor of cartography at the University of Southern Maine.
Ptolemy gathered documents detailing the locations of towns, and he augmented that information with the tales of travelers.
By the time he was done, he had devised a system of lines of latitude and longitude, and plotted some 10,000 locations—from Britain to Europe, Asia and North Africa.
Ptolemy even invented ways to flatten the planet (like most Greeks and Romans, he knew the Earth was round) onto a two-dimensional map.
What did he call his new technique? “Geography.”
After the Roman Empire fell, Ptolemy’s realistic geography was lost to the West for almost a thousand years.
Once again, maps were concerned more with storytelling: A famous 12th-century map made by the Islamic scholar al-Sharif al-Idrisi—commissioned by his protector and patron, King Roger II of Sicily, a Christian—neatly blended Islamic and Christian cities together, while centering the world on (of course) Roger’s landholdings.
The Hereford World Map: Mappa Mundi The Hereford World Map, made in around 1300, is recognised by UNESCO as an exceptionally important cultural artefact: the medieval world in one iconic object
Other Christian maps cared even less about accuracy: They were mappaemundi, designed to show how the story of Christ penetrated the world.
The most famous of these was made in Hereford, England—a massive 5- by 4-foot creation drawn on a single animal skin.
Almost none of Europe, Asia or North Africa is recognizable, and strange wonders run amok: A lynx struts across Asia Minor (“it sees through walls and urinates a black stone,” the mapmakers note); Noah’s Ark is perched up in Armenia; Africa is populated by people with eyes and mouths in their shoulders.
At the top of the map—which faced east, the holiest direction—were pictures showing Adam and Eve tossed out of Eden, and Christ returning on the Day of Judgment.
The map wasn’t intended to get you from town to town.
It was designed to guide you to heaven.
As the Renaissance dawned, maps began to improve.
Commerce demanded it—ships were crossing oceans, and kings engaged in empire-building needed to chart their lands.
Technology drove maps to greater accuracy: The advent of reliable compasses helped create “portolan” maps, which had lines crisscrossing the sea from port to port, helping guide sailors.
Ptolemy’s ancient work was rediscovered, and new maps were drawn based on his thousand-year-old calculations.
1474 map of the Atlantic Ocean according to Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli,
transcribed on a modern map of the Americas.
Indeed, Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America was partly due to Ptolemy—and errors in his cartography.
Columbus carried a map influenced by the ancient Roman’s work.
But Ptolemy thought the world was 30 percent smaller than it actually is; worse, the mapmaker was using Arabian miles, which were longer than Italian ones.
Together these mistakes led Columbus to believe the voyage to Asia would be much shorter.
It was an early example of a GPS-like near disaster.
An
early Spanish explorer, possibly confused by the Baja Peninsula,
reported in the 16th century that California was surrounded by water on
all sides.
This
error was enshrined by the Amsterdam mapmaker Michiel Colijn in 1622,
and California was drawn as an island well into the 18th century.
Pierre Mortier's 1703 Nautical Map of the World
with the island of California
As sea trade increased, maps of the New World became better, at least the seacoasts and major rivers, places the beaver trade depended on.
The inland of America was mostly a mystery; mapmakers often draw it as a big blank space labeled “terra incognita.”
“The coastlines were accurate, but they weren’t as concerned about the interiors,” notes John Rennie Short, a professor and cartography expert at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
“The rest is, like, Who knows? As long as you keep bringing the beavers, we don’t care.”
Professor Jerry Brotton talking about map projections,
Google Earth and various styles of historic maps.
Sea voyages became easier after 1569, when Gerardus Mercator unveiled the single greatest innovation in mapping after Ptolemy: the Mercator Projection.
A polymath who was equally skilled in engraving and mathematics, Mercator figured out the best trick yet to represent the surface of a globe on a map—by gradually widening the landmasses and oceans the farther north and south they appear on the map.
This was a great aid to navigation, but it also subtly distorted how we see the world: Countries close to the poles—like Canada and Russia—were artificially enlarged, while regions at the Equator, like Africa, shrank.
This was becoming the cardinal rule of maps: “No map entirely tells the truth,” notes Mark Monmonier, author of How to Lie With Maps.
“There’s always some distortion, some point of view.”
"Geography is the eye of history."
Hakluyt's dedication to Sir Walter Raleigh
in his English trans. of "De orbe novo decades" in 1612.
Indeed, everyday people were realizing that a map was an act of persuasion, a visual rhetoric.
In 1553, gentry in Surrey, England, drew a map of the town’s central fields, to prove these were common lands—and that villagers thus should be allowed to graze animals there.
The map, they wrote, would allow for “the more playne manifest and direct understondying” of the situation.
Maps, says Rose Mitchell, a map archivist at the National Archives of the U.K., were “used to settle arguments.”
Meanwhile, educated people began collecting maps and displaying them “to show off how knowledgeable they were,” she adds.
Even if you couldn’t read the words on a map from a foreign country, you could generally understand it, and even navigate by it.
The persuasive power of a map was its glanceability.
It was data made visual.
This mountain range, depicted in a stretch near the west coast of Africa, was first drawn up in 1798 by the British cartographer James Rennell and copied throughout most of the 19th century.
Finally, in 1889, a French adventurer went to the region and reported that there were barely even any hills there.
Maps weren’t just symbols of power: They conferred power.
With a good map, a military had an advantage in battle, a king knew how much land could be taxed.
Western maps showing Africa’s interior as empty—the mapmakers had little to go on—gave empires dreamy visions of claiming Africa for themselves: All that empty space seemed, to them, ripe for the taking.
Maps helped propel the depredations of colonialism, as Simon Garfield argues in On the Map.
The United States after Lewis and Clark showed Americans just how much West there was to be won.
Mind you, their trip was hellish: Previous maps were so vague they showed the Rockies as a single mountain range.
“So they thought they were just going to cruise up to it, go over the top, and pop their canoes back in the river and go all the way to Pacific,” laughs David Rumsey, who created Stanford’s map collection in his name.
“And it was a bloody nightmare, up and down, up and down.”
120 ancient maps from the David Rumsey collection
overlayed on Google Maps in the GeoGarage platform
Maps were so valuable that seafarers plundered them.
When the 17th-century buccaneer Bartholomew Sharp captured a Spanish ship, he exulted over his cartographic haul: “In this prize I took a Spanish manuscript of prodigious value,” he later wrote.
“It describes all the ports, harbors, bayes, Sands, rock & rising of the land....They were going to throw it over board but by good luck I saved it. The Spanish cried when I gott the book.”
By the late 19th century, the surge in mathematic reasoning and measurement technology made mapmaking explode.
In France, the Cassini family crisscrossed the country to calculate its dimensions with precision never before seen.
Their trick?
Using “triangulation”—a bit of trigonometry—to let them stitch together thousands of measurements taken by peering through the new, high-tech “theodolite.”
Breakthroughs in binocular lenses allowed surveyors to measure scores of miles at a glance.
World maps became increasingly accurate.
York, Yorkshire, England. Used with permission of Verlag Karl Baedeker GMBH.
Local mapping became deeply granular.
The British Ordnance Survey began mapping the U.K.down to the square yard, and the German entrepreneur Karl Baedeker produced similarly nuanced maps of European cities.
Tourists could now confidently tour foreign realms, their annually updated guides in hand, able to locate individual buildings, much like today’s citizens peering at Google Maps on their phones.
Being prominent on a local map was valuable to merchants, so mapmakers in the U.S.
sold the rights.
“If you paid more, you’d get your building cited,” Short notes.
“It was like advertising.”
Maps could change the way people understood the world around them.
In the 1880s, the social reformer Charles Booth produced a moral map of London, with houses color-coded by income and—in Booth’s shaky calculations—criminal tendencies.
(Areas colored yellow were “wealthy,” while black ones were “Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal.”)
Booth wanted to help aid the poor by showing geography was tied to destiny, but his techniques wound up reinforcing it: in the U.S., banks began to “redline” poor neighborhoods, refusing to loan money to anyone in their precincts.
By the 20th century, maps helped win the Second World War.
Winston Churchill fought with guidance from his “map room,” an underground chamber where up to 40 military staffers would shove colored pins into the map-bedecked walls; Churchill adorned his bedroom wall with a huge map showing Britain’s coast, constantly visualizing in his mind how to defend it against invasion.
These days, our maps seem alive: They speak, in robotic voices, telling us precisely where to go—guided by the satellites and mapping of companies like Waze, Google, Bing and Mapquest.
“There’s something fun about turn-by-turn directions,” says Greg Milner, author of Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture and Our Minds.
“It’s very seductive.”
There’s no need even to orient yourself to north: The robot voice tells you to turn right, turn left, with you always at the center.
Milner worries, though, that GPS is weakening something fundamental in ourselves, corroding not just our orientation skills, but how well we remember the details of the world around us.
A 2008 study in Japan found that people who used a GPS to navigate a city developed a shakier grasp of the terrain than those who consulted a paper map or those who learned the route via direct experience.
Similarly, a 2008 Cornell study found that “GPS eliminates much of the need to pay attention.”
Some map historians agree that a subtle change is at hand.
Short tells me that he likes the convenience of GPS-brokered directions—“but what I do lose is the sense of how things hang together.”
Rumsey isn’t convinced of this loss, though.
As he argues, the convenience of GPS and online mapping means we live in an increasingly cartographic age.
Many online searches produce a map as part of the search results—for a local store, a vacation spot, live traffic updates before heading home.
People today see far more maps in a single day than they used to, Rumsey notes: “The more you interact with maps, the more agile you become. Maps beget more maps.”
When Rumsey first started collecting and displaying maps in the 1970s, people said, Why bother? These are old and out of date; who cares?
Now when people visit his collection at Stanford they “get it right away.
That’s because they’ve been exposed.”
City mapmakers have long worried about their work being copied by competitors, so they include misnamed streets and walkways (like London’s Bartlett Place).
Moat Lane, a fictitious street in North London that originated in the TeleAtlas directory, was temporarily marked on Google Maps.
It’s possible both effects are true.
When I decide to order some takeout, my phone will—like a robot Baedeker—generate a map of local places that are open.
It’s true that if I walked to one, I’d just numbly be following zigzagging turn-by-turn directions.
But on the other hand, I look at that little gustatorial mappamundi of my neighborhood pretty often; I could probably draw it from memory by now.
Technology hasn’t changed some of our oldest urges.
The historian Brotton once visited Google, where the engineers showed him a huge, wall-sized version of Google Earth.
They asked him, whenever a visitor shows up to try it out, what’s the first thing they zoom in to look for?
Their own home.
“They go, wow, look at that!” Brotton says.
It’s the same perspective as the people who held that Babylonian clay tablet nearly three millennia ago: using a map to figure out where, exactly, we stand.
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