The Siberian city ofYakutsk, in the Russian Far East, is unfathomably cold, yet home to over a quarter million people:
Yakutsk has an average annual temperature of 17.6 °F winter high temperatures consistently well below −4 °F, and a record low of −−83.9 °F. As a result, Yakutsk is the coldest major city in the world
**Bell Island, **part of the Franz Josef Land archipelago in Russia.
I couldn’t believe this:
The island was the first among the Franz Josef archipelago to be visited by Benjamin Leigh Smith in his 1880 expedition. In his second expedition to the islands in 1881, Smith built a wooden lodge on the north side of the island which he used to winter. The lodge stands to this day.
A small wooden shack, built on an island in the Arctic Ocean, stands for 150 years. Will think about that next time I’m building something.
A harebrained scheme to flood deserts, create ecosystems out of dead zones, sequester carbon, and create new economically productive geographies — through “seaflooding”. Take places like the Dead Sea, which is already well below sea level, and fill it up by pipelining in water from the Med or the Red Sea.
All of this would create a much bigger sea where algae could grow, fish could feed on the algae, and birds could feed on the fish. Plants would grow on the shoreline with the added moisture, and more animals would come… It would transform a desert into a new Mediterranean.
This, of course, would not just create a thriving biological environment. It would create amazing economic opportunities for more agriculture and more tourism. These would justify more infrastructure, which would further increase the wealth of the area.
I’m a pretty big skeptic about terraforming as a realistic endeavor. Not only on grounds of costs or feasibility, but on the fear of tampering with pre-existing natural systems. The Ian Malcolm in me is hesitant to confuse feasibility and viability. Just because it’s plausible, doesn’t mean a) it will work or b) it won’t have even worse second-order effects. It’s well worth the debate and thought experiment, though!
This is a fascinating video on the Wallace Line, which separates to biogeographic regions:
The wildlife on each side differ tremendously from one another, even the line cuts through straits that aren’t wide at all.
Naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (a contemporary of Darwin), noticed the distinction and defined the line. But what we now know is that he discovered the effects of plate tectonics decades before the theory was formalized.
So it’s not that different species mysteriously won’t cross the line — it’s that the separated landmasses with their own distinct biological lineages are now closer than they’ve been for millions of years.
This image from Landsat 8 shows the western end of the English Channel off the coast of Cornwall. A phytoplankton bloom spreads for dozens of miles, filling the St. Austell Bay.
The only time I was on the Channel was on the ferry from Dover to Calais, on a particularly rough but clear day.
The river’s floodplain looks amazing from the air, a 10+ mile wide swath with dozens of smaller streams formed as the main course has meandered all over and stranded oxbows and dropped bands of sediment.
Bryan put together this neat little utility for merging point data with containing polygon attributes with spatial join queries. It uses Turf.js to do the geoprocess in the browser.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has captured its highest-resolution panorama yet of the Martian surface. Composed of more than 1,000 images taken during the 2019 Thanksgiving holiday and carefully assembled over the ensuing months, the composite contains 1.8 billion pixels of Martian landscape. The rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, used its telephoto lens to produce the panorama; meanwhile, it relied on its medium-angle lens to produce a lower-resolution, nearly 650-million-pixel panorama that includes the rover’s deck and robotic arm.
“Easy” because there’s a delay between benefit and cost.
The cost of exercising is immediate. Exercise hurts while you’re doing it, and the harder the exercise the more the hurt. Investing is different. It has a cost, just like exercising. But its costs can be delayed by years.
Whenever there’s a delay between benefit and cost, the benefits always seem easier than they are. And whenever the benefits seem easier than they are, people take risks they shouldn’t. It’s why there are investing bubbles, but not exercise bubbles.
Lake Chad spans 4 national borders in the central Sahel: Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon. Since the 1960s it’s shrunk to about 5% its ancestral size, due to overuse, mismanagement, and climate shifts.
This NASA photo uses SRTM data combined with Landsat 8 to highlight the edges of the basin that was once the size of the Caspian Sea:
About 7,000 years ago, a vast lake spread hundreds of square kilometers across north-central Africa. Known to scientists as Lake Mega Chad, it covered more than 400,000 square kilometers (150,000 square miles) at its peak, making it slightly larger than the Caspian Sea, the biggest lake on Earth today.
Modern Lake Chad has shrunk to just a fraction of its former size, but evidence of the lake’s ancient shorelines is still etched into desert landscapes — hundreds of kilometers from the shores of the modern lake.
If you look at the Lake today on Google Earth, you’ll see some amazing landforms where the Saharan dunes transition to swampland on the shores of the basin. There’s some incredibly high-resolution data in that region:
Combining baseball and maps? Sign me up. The MLB has a plan to “improve” the MiLB system costs, standards, compensation, and other things through shuttering 42 ball clubs around the country. In this piece for FanGraphs, the authors use some GIS tactics to analyze how this shakes out for baseball fans falling within those markets:
So how many Americans would see their ability to watch affiliated baseball in person disappear under MLB’s proposal? And how many would see their primary point of access shift from the relatively affordable games of the minor leagues to major league ones? To work out how the closure of these minor league teams will affect access to baseball, we went to the map. More specifically, we took the geographical center of each ZCTA (a close relative of ZIP Codes used by the Census Bureau). We calculated the distance as the crow flies from each ZCTA to each ballpark in America, both in 2019 and in MLB’s proposed new landscape.
Seems like a strange move for transit agencies to sell the naming rights to entire stations to private entities. Would it really raise revenues enough to make a dent in paying for operations or improving systems? Seems like the downsides outweigh the upsides here. I’m all for experimentation in improving public services, but this seems like a lazy method for raising a few million bucks.
I did learn a new handy phrase here:
There’s a phrase that urban geographers use for this private rebranding of public space: “toponymic commodification.”
In preparation for this year’s Geography 2050 theme (“borders in a borderless world”), this map gives a helpful sense of how relatively young most of the world’s international boundaries are. Outside of Europe, most boundaries are shades of red or blue (dating from 1800 or later).
I’m an airplane window seat guy. So when on a flight with good views, I end up gazing out the window for most of the time and capturing my own aerial imagery.
Our Monday flight from Fort Lauderdale to San Juan took us over the Bahamas, so I got some nice scenery to look at during the trip. The first batch was over the centerline of the Bahamian chain, next over Turks and Caicos, then a gap of ocean north of Hispaniola until reaching Puerto Rico.
Here are some of the best shots, with captions for reference.
The Bahamas
Not long after take-off you first see the massive island of Andros on the west side of the island group. It’s land area is greater than all of the other 700 Bahamian islands combined. There are so many islands scattered across a huge area (about the area of Florida) that make up the Bahamas.
Andros Island's north tip, Joulter Cay, and Long CayChub CayNew Providence — home to the capital, NassauNassau and Paradise IslandNew Providence with Andros in the backgroundExuma & Exuma SoundConception IslandRum CayMayaguana
Turks and Caicos
Turks and Caicos is actually a British territory, not its own sovereign nation. I didn’t even remember how close it was to the Bahamas until looking at the map. Most of the people live on Providenciales in the larger Caicos group, and more on the much smaller Grand Turk island.
North CaicosEast CaicosGrand Turk
Puerto Rico
An hour or so later we saw the coastline of Puerto Rico, flying right over downtown San Juan on the way in.
I first saw this through Google’s Earth View a few months back. It’s a coastal area of the Kimberly Region in Western Australia.
Bands of low-lying mountain ranges run from southeast to northwest, jutting out into the Timor Sea. The striated bands of folded rock formations create low-elevation channels, and where these meet the ocean you get fjord-like features slicing into the coastline. It reminds me of The Vale from the map of Westeros.
Along the coast you get features like the Horizontal Falls: a bottleneck at the mouth of a creek where creek outflows and high tidal waters back up, and when the tide falls rapidly, the onrush of draining water can’t get out fast enough.
It’s a beautiful shot of a wild and remote part of northwestern Australia.
Our friends over at the American Geographical Society have spearheaded a new competition (in partnership with the Omidyar Network) called EthicalGEO to seek out new ideas on how the community can better understand the ethical challenges with geospatial data, privacy, sharing, and the like, and find solutions and systems to embrace what’s new and combat the risks and downsides:
The EthicalGEO initiative seeks to activate thinkers, innovators, entrepreneurs, policymakers, practitioners, students, and everyday citizens and bring them in to a global dialog that shines a light on their best ideas about the ethical challenges and opportunities posed by the many geospatial technologies and data sources that are reshaping our society. Just as the EthicalAI dialog has enabled a broad-based discussion about the future implications of AI, and the ways in which our society might steer the technology to our purposes, the EthicalGEO initiative seeks to spur a similar conversation around the flurry of geospatial innovations that have become part of our daily lives.
This striking image shows sediment flow from the Kolyma, a 1,300 mile braided river that originates in the mountains of Eastern Siberia.
For about eight months of the year, the Kolyma River is frozen to depths of several meters. But every June, the river thaws and carries vast amounts of suspended sediment and organic material into the Arctic Ocean. That surge of fresh, soil-ridden waters colors the Kolyma Gulf (Kolymskiy Zaliv) dark brown and black.
Nearby to the west you can see a pockmarked landscape of hundreds of glacial lakes that the river winds around. An amazing-looking landscape, but of course for 8-10 months out of the year looks much different — frozen beneath ice and snow. Remote, desolate places like this showcase how much impact ice and water can have on shaping the land.
Most people don’t know how earth imaging satellites work. All they know is a camera is flying overhead snapping photos. This visualization gives you an animated picture of how Planet’s satellite constellation can cover the entire globe every day for a continuously-updated view of the Earth:
In four years, Planet has flown on 18 successful launches and deployed 293 satellites successfully into low Earth orbit. With more than 150 satellites currently in orbit, Planet has the largest constellation of Earth imaging satellites in history.
Amazing that we’ve got this kind of capability with microsatellite technology. Right now most of the sensors (the “Doves”) give 3m resolution, but this’ll just keep getting better.
On this edition of Places is the Mergui Archipelago, a string of coastal islands off of southern Myanmar in the Andaman Sea.
I saw this image a few years back on NASA’s Earth Observatory feed. It’s an amazing snapshot from Landsat 5 that shows gorgeous colors from the silts and sediments emptied at the mouth of the Lenya River. The tidal motions make the colored sea water smear across the image like an oil painting. I also love the dendritic patterns of the streams and tributaries on the islands. They give a sense of scale to the archipelago (it’s a lot longer north to south than what the image shows).
Also found this interesting piece of trivia from Wikipedia:
In the 1965 James Bond film Thunderball, Ernst Stavro Blofeld demands that NATO pay the international criminal organization SPECTRE a ransom of white flawless diamonds worth £100 million to be deposited in the Mergui Archipelago off the coast of Myanmar.
The mountain stages of the Tour de France are some of my favorite events in sports. This edition of Places features a tribute to this year’s 18th stage, and one of my favorite climbs of the Alps: the Col du Galibier, a 2,600m HC beast with an epic descent on the other side.
Galibier was last climbed in the 2017 Tour, during an awesome Stage 17 when Primož Roglič won the day on a route that included famous climbs on Col de la Croix de Fer, Col du Télégraphe, and the Galibier.
This year’s stage route includes the Galibier and another HC fixture in Col d’Izoard, also last seen in the 2017 edition when Warren Barguil had a memorable mountaintop finish there.
While it’s a big body of water when you pan over it on the map, it’s size is hard to fathom when compared to other geographic features:
If you are traveling on Canada’s Great Slave Lake, you will notice one characteristic right away: it is enormous. Roughly the size of Belgium, it ranks in the top fifteen largest lakes worldwide. It is the deepest lake in North America, diving about 615 meters (2,020 feet)—almost the same extent as the world’s second tallest building, the Shanghai Tower.
It’s strange to imagine that you could be on a body of water that’s oceanic in size, miles out of sight of land, but in the middle of the remote Canadian wilderness. The glaciated scarring of the Simpson Islands on the east side must be truly impressive in person. Massive rocks and hundreds of tiny islands dotting the deep water.
I would bet that, if polled, most people would have no idea that 2 of the 10 largest lakes in the world are in Canada. The Great Bear Lake further north is even larger!
Only geography nerds have NASA’s Earth Observatory feed set up in their RSS reader. On there a team from NASA share interesting images from around the world as they come in from the various earth observation satellite sensors in orbit.
I check out items as they come through the feed and will occasionally download my favorites to edit into wallpapers for my laptop or phone. One of the best ever that’s been the wallpaper-of-choice on my machine for the past year is this great shot of Tanzania’s Lake Natron:
This one came from the Landsat 8 platform a couple of years ago. It’s a salt lake that sits in the East African Rift Valley and has a beautiful red tint that comes and goes with the blooms of “halophile” (I love that word, salt-loving) bacteria in the lake.
I browse maps all the time, panning around in Google Earth whenever I want to look something up, favoriting things along the way. I thought I’d start documenting some of those here.
The Richat Structure is a circular geologic dome formation in the Mauritanian Sahara. I actually saw this when I was panning around the desert looking at the striated mountains you can see going from east to west toward the Atlantic. The whole structure is about 20 miles in diameter, and looks completely alien and out of place in the desert.
“It may seem surprising but, in terms of digital media storage, our knowledge of language almost fits compactly on a floppy disk,” the authors wrote in the study. In this case, that would be a floppy disk that holds about 1.5 megabytes of information, or the equivalent of about a minute-long song as an Mp3 file. [3D Images: Exploring the Human Brain]
The researchers estimate that in the best-case scenario, in a single day, an adult remembers 1,000 to 2,000 bits of their native language. In the worst-case scenario, we remember around 120 bits per day.
My friend and co-worker Joe Larson has been doing some cool experiments with Blender for generating hillshades, jumping off of work from Andy Woodruff, Daniel Huffman, and Scott Reinhard. I’ve seen a few different hillshade / topo composites that look super cool.
Nassim Taleb’s concept of “antifragility is a fascinating philosophical framework; one which I’ve linked to and mentioned here before. This Farnam Street post summarizes 10 thinking concepts to help orient your own life and decision making toward antifragility:
In short, stop optimizing for today or tomorrow and start playing the long game. That means being less efficient in the short term but more effective in the long term. It’s easy to optimize for today, simply spend more money than you make or eat food that’s food designed in a lab to make you eat more and more. But if you play the long game you stop optimizing and start thinking ahead to the second order consequences of your decisions.
I love this piece — a detailed analysis, backstory, and new map of Odysseus’s supposed voyages around the Mediterranean:
In 1597 the cartographer Abraham Ortelius became the first person to draw a map of Odysseus’ travels. Like many Homeric geographers, Ortelius identifies Scheria, home of the Phaeacians, with Corcyra (now known as Corfu) because of a passage from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War claiming the Phaeacians were the previous inhabitants of that island. While widely accepted, this identification of Scheria with Corcyra creates a problem. Homer clearly places Calypso’s island west of Scheria, but there is no island in the Ionian Sea west of Corcyra. Ortelius, following in the footsteps of Pliny, mapped a nonexistent island off southern Italy and called it the home of Calypso. The imaginary island appeared on maps through the mid-nineteenth century, and individuals continued to search for it into the twentieth. (Perhaps it had sunk into the sea?)
Geographers for thousands of years have been attempting to reconstruct the trail.
Mapbox has built this curated dataset of administrative boundaries from country level down to local geographic units like arrondissements, prefectures, and districts. Knowing how difficult it is to aggregate and clean up all this different datasources into a single cohesive product, this is an impressive dataset that they’re providing through their developer tools for geocoding and joining to other data. Browse the dataset on this interactive map.
One of the highlights of the west → east flight from Northern California is the chance to get views over the ranges of California, Nevada, and Colorado. The first leg of my flight home this week took me from San Jose to Denver, offering up those snow-capped mountains I so rarely get to see living in the southeast.
Not too far into the flight you come upon the Sierra Nevada, if you’re lucky passing right over the Yosemite Valley. Today there was a thin, low cloud layer over the mountains, so the view wasn’t perfectly clear, but I caught pretty great views of the peaks and notches of the high Sierras.
The folds of the basin and range province as you pass over Nevada are some of my favorite landforms to check out from the air — 500 miles of alternating faulted mountains and flatlands.
This was a cool idea from cartographer Daniel Huffman. He live-streamed a walkthrough taking apart one of his map projects in Illustrator to see how he puts it all together.
I love this idea and am excited to see him do more like this down the road.
I don’t remember what got me to it, but the other day I found this short documetary video about Southern California’s Salton Sea, a saline lake about 80 miles inland from San Diego:
I knew about its infamy as a failed resort destination, with planned developments like Desert Shores and Salton City that popped up on its edge in the 1950s. What I didn’t know was the sea’s history as the result of an engineering accident, induced by the California Development Company trying to divert the Colorado for irrigation purposes, back in 1905. That accident, high rains and snowmelt, and subsequent attempts to control the high waters resulted in the basin filling up. The geothermal activity in the valley gave the lake a salty, sulfurous quality that since ruined its chances as a vacation attraction.
On this week’s flight into LAX, I got to see the lake from the air. It’s an eerie thing to see the bones of little towns scattered along its shores. Even from 30,000 feet you can see the murkiness of the water. From this perspective, it’s amazing to think that the developers of the mid 20th century thought there was promise here.
I picked up John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country this week. You could think of it like a biography of Alaska: the region pre- and post-statehood, its people, the wilderness, wildlife, and its vastness.
Woven throughout are reminders of just how massive the untouched wilderness is in Alaska, and how far you really are from civilization out in the flatlands or up in the Brooks Range.
Early in the book he and his companions are traveling up the Salmon River, in the Kobuk Valley National Park (still not designated in 1977 at the time of writing):
The Kobuk Valley National Monument proposal, which includes nearly two million acres, is, in area, relatively modest among ten other pieces of Alaska that are similarly projected for confirmation by Congress as new parks and monuments. In all, these lands constitute over thirty-two million acres, which is more than all the Yosemites, all the Yellowstones, all the Grand Canyons and Sequoias put together — a total that would more than double the present size of the National Park System. For cartographic perspective, thirty-two million acres slightly exceeds the area of the state of New York.
The last several months I’ve been spending quite a bit of time working on this: our geospatial data and analytical product line called Foresight. We’ve been in this business dating back to 2000 in various forms and using the technologies of the era, but empowered by today’s technology, decision support tools, and the open source geo stack, it’s evolved to something novel and unmatched for our customers.
At its core it’s “data-as-a-service” designed to give customers the insights they need to do more, spend less, decide faster, and reduce their uncertainty, with a focus on international geospatial markets.
As Tony put it succinctly in his post, which sums it up nicely:
The ability to know before you go or even, in some cases, eliminate the need to go at all is a unique hallmark to our Foresight products.
We’re working on some example products right now that’ll tell a concrete, compelling story about how Foresight works in practice. I’ll be interested to share more about that down the road once we get them out there.
Mesmerizing, hypnotic video shot in 8K pointed straight down from an airplane. It looks like these were originally shot for Apple to use as their “Aerial” screensaver seen on Apple TV.
I could leave this on a loop in my office all day.
In the spirit of yesterday’s post on the Earth of the past, this interactive map lets you browse back in time to see what oceans and landmasses looked like all the way back to 750 million years ago. Try typing in your address to see if you’d have been a resident of Gondwana or Laurasia if you took your time machine back to the Triassic.
When I read Annals of the Former World some years back, the hardest thing to wrap my head around with geologic time was the sheer scale of what “100 million years” looks like. No matter how many of the comparisons, scale bars, or timelines I see, it’s still mind-blowing to think about continents converging, separating, and reconverging repeatedly throughout history.
Every year since the pre-Stone Age area, visualized as a time lapse on a map.
This is amazing and puts into context what was developing where over time. I know when I read the history of one culture, like Ancient Greece, it’s hard to keep in the mind what was happening elsewhere in the world during the same time period. This video could be a good reference point to pull up to get a sense of what happened during, before, and after any period in human history.
It’s also hard to believe that in 3000 BC the global population estimate was only 30 million people, or roughly the population of modern Nepal.
The UCI World Tour season kicks off this week with the Tour Down Under.
I started following pro cycling closely about 5 years ago, but since it’s fairly hard to get access to on broadcasts, I only get to watch a handful of events each year. With the NBC Cycling Pass you get some big events, like the Tour de France and Vuelta a España, plus some other fun ones in the spring like Paris-Roubaix, Paris-Nice, and Liège-Bastogne-Liège.
Last season while watching the Criterium du Dauphiné, it dawned on me one of the reasons I got into watching televised cycling tours so easily: it’s a great sport for a geographer. The sweeping views over the Massif Central, Pyrenees, or the rivers of the Alps are incredible. While I’m watching a stage and the peloton is passing through villages or past medieval landmarks, I’ll be on Wikipedia checking out the history of the places they’re racing.
With some top cyclist team moves in the off season, there are a few big things to watch. I’ll try and catch what I can of the Tour Down Under and get a preview. Never was able to watch that one before.
My colleagues Bill Dollins and Todd Pollard (the core of our data team), wrote this post detailing how we go from original ground-based data collection in Fulcrum through a data processing pipeline to deliver product to customers. A combination of PostGIS, Python tools, FME, Amazon RDS, and other custom QA tools get us from raw content to finished, analyst-ready GEOINT products.
The 518 coordinated flights operation, by 16 Northern California emergency responder agencies, is one of the biggest drone response to a disaster scene in the nation’s history. The 16 UAV teams were led by Alameda County Sheriff’s Office. Stockton Police, Contra Cost County Sheriff’s Office & Menlo Park Fire Protection District had the most team members present, with Union City Police, Hayward Police and Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Office providing units as well. San Francisco Police oversaw airspace mitigation. In addition to the mapping flights, over 160 full 360-degrees and interactive panoramas were created with the help of Hangar, as well as geo-referenced video was shot along major roads in Paradise through Survae.
An impressive effort by response agencies in California to respond to this tragic disaster and assess the damage.
An article on the Great Unconformity in the geologic record and its potential cause:
The Grand Canyon is a gigantic geological library, with rocky layers that tell much of the story of Earth’s history. Curiously though, a sizeable layer representing anywhere from 250 million years to 1.2 billion years is missing.
The likely culprit was a theoretical planetwide glaciated period known as the “Snowball Earth”.
Khan Academy’s Andy Matuschak on tasks that require “depth of knowledge” versus those that have higher “transfer demand.” Both can be considered “difficult” in a sense, but teaching techniques to build knowledge need different approaches:
One big implication of mastery learning is that students should have as much opportunity to practice a skill as they’d like. Unlike a class that moves at a fixed pace, a struggling student should always be able to revisit prerequisites, read an alternative explanation, and try some new challenges. These systems usually consider a student to have finally “mastered” a skill when they can consistently answer related problems over an extended period of time.
I’m working on a special side project right now, getting myself back into cartography a bit. The last time I did any serious cartography work was with TileMill, probably 4 or 5 years ago. This time I’m trying my hand with QGIS to see what I can do.
For part of this project I wanted topographic maps, for both data and design inspiration. I was reminded of this excellent tool for browsing and downloading the archive of historical topo maps from the USGS. I have no idea why this isn’t the primary interface for the National Map, but I’m glad it exists. It makes searching and downloading the data so much simpler.
Borders in today’s world are remarkably static, ever-present lines we all get used to separating territories as if there are hard barriers to interaction between the multicolored countries of your average political map of the world. Centuries of perpetual war, invasions, treaties, intermarrying monarchs, imperialism, and revolutions redrew the global map with regularity, but today we don’t see this level of volatility. When a new country is formed, a disputed territory shifts, or a country is renamed, it makes global headlines. It’s only every few years that you see territorial shifts.
This level of stability can be attributed to the interconnectedness of modern global society. In Connectography, Parag Khanna makes a compelling case for the dissolving relevance of international borders. His thesis is that cities are now the dominant focal point of human engagement and productivity rather than states, and that the grid of connection points between cities has largely superseded the importance of international borders: “a future shaped less by national borders than by global supply chains, a world in which the most connected powers—and people—will win.”
Asia's web of connections
Worldwide economic growth has created a level of stability unprecedented in human history. In Thomas Friedman’s 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, he posits the “Golden Arches Theory” — that “no two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s.” Meaning once economies are significantly integrated with one another, the cost of conflict increases, thereby deterring each side from sparring with one another. While this tongue-in-cheek theory offers an overly simplistic view of the world, the point still largely holds up today. Nations go to “economic war” more readily than armed conflict.
Expanding on Friedman’s theory from 20 years ago, Khanna clarifies that it isn’t specific enough to attribute stability to “globalization” in some broad sense. More concretely, it is interconnectedness that creates a shared sense of motivation, collaboration, and responsibility for progress. As he points out, some of the least connected places on earth are the ones with the least stability:
“Importantly, the geographies not knitting themselves together into collective functional zones—the Near East and Central Asia—are also generally where one finds the most failed states.”
The concept of “global cities” started to take hold in the nineties — cities that function as nodes on the global interconnected network thanks to the connective tissue of infrastructure: Shanghai, New York, London, Singapore, Hong Kong, and others. Modern telecommunications, energy distribution, and transportation networks wire people closely together while ignoring the man-made boundaries between nations, the social barriers of language and culture, and even the physical barriers in mountains and oceans. Khanna makes the case that we should redraw our maps to more vividly represent reality on the ground:
“The absence of the full panoply of man-made infrastructure on our maps gives the impression that borders trump other means of portraying human geography.”
With increasing human migration to to urban areas, the city is where human activity now takes place. Cities (especially global ones) are beginning to form economic and diplomatic bonds with one another, regardless of the proximity or cultural similarity of their respective states. Central to Khanna’s point is that this economic and technological expansion has enabled supply chains to drive the social order:
“Supply chains are self-assembling and organically connecting. They expand, contract, shift, multiply, and diversify as a result of our collective human activity. You can disrupt supply chains, but they will quickly find alternative pathways to fulfill their missions.”
Globalization and the ever-multiplying division of labor allows for even historically landlocked places excluded from the global economy to specialize and “plug into” the network, taking their place in the flexible supply chain. The competition to become a new link in the supply chain creates positive forces that motivate people to create value for others up the chain. What used to be a hierarchical order between large states has dissolved into hundreds or thousands of largely-independent nodes that invest in their own specialties, a decentralization that reworks the old world order:
“The interstate puzzle thus gives way to a lattice of infrastructure circuitry. The world is starting to look a lot like the Internet.”
One focal point of the book is on the policy tactics cities are using to embrace connection and openness within their current constraints of monarchy or centralized control. The “Special Economic Zone” (SEZ) is a tool in the arsenal gaining acceptance around the world to invite foreign investment in the form of corporate presence inside of a nation’s borders. As Khanna points out, they’re gaining in popularity with “more than four thousand SEZs around the world, the pop-up cities of a functional supply chain world.” Acting as if there’s little to no barrier to collaborative development, a US-based company can establish a presence in Shenzhen, Dubai, or Batam that was impossible 20 or 30 years ago. Powered by the infrastructural connections brought about by the internet, containerized shipping, and international financial investments, these SEZs provide havens for countries to ignore one another’s political boundaries. In places like China’s Pearl River Delta, this interconnectedness with other global cities has enabled unprecedented growth — now with nearly 60 million people plugged into an economy by leveraging its network proximity to the other centers of gravity, like a critical router in a network topology diagram. The savvy of the local government in attracting multinational corporate investment (even though counter to much of the party dogma) can be credited with an enormous jump in quality of life for millions of former rural Chinese that have since migrated to the region.
A lively, connected Arctic
The book is full of rich examples of locales as diverse as colonial Southeast Asia, the Caucasus, the Near East, and East Africa. A theory this compelling on modern economic freedom and progress requires connecting the dots of history to understand how we arrived here. Throughout the book there are maps peppered in to visualize the pervasiveness of infrastructural connection. There’s even a website devoted to making the maps interactive, so you can see for yourself how interconnected the world already is, regardless of political rhetoric of the day.
Connectography is an engaging read for anyone interested in geopolitics, international relations, and geography. Khanna has developed a thought-provoking theory of economic development for the modern era.
Some fun facts from the book:
🏙 In 1950, the world had only two megacities of populations larger than 10 million: Tokyo and New York City. By 2025, there will be at least forty such megacities.
🇲🇽 The population of the greater Mexico City region is larger than that of Australia, as is that of Chongqing, a collection of connected urban enclaves spanning an area the size of Austria.
🏗 China consumed more cement between 2010 and 2013 than America did in the entire twentieth century.
For more on Khanna’s work on Connectography, check these out:
I was curious, so I went and tracked down each one on Google Earth. And because I’m a nerd, here’s a geojson file with all of them so you can quickly find and marvel at their remoteness.
Part of Vox’s Borders video series. Hong Kong is such a fascinating and unique place, as is today’s China, though for massively different reasons. How China treats HK will be one of the indicators of the wider Chinese plan for free market economics and political openness.
This is the first book review post since I put up my library section. I hope to do more of this in the future with each new book I add to the collection. Enjoy.
The Story of Maps took me a while to get through, but it’s the most comprehensive history I’ve seen on the history of geography and cartography.
Of particular note was the history of the figures in antiquity, their discoveries, and the techniques they used to advance the science of mapmaking. From Strabo, Eratosthenes, and Ptolemy to Ortelius, Mercator, and Huygens, Brown is extremely thorough in giving each of the critical figures their space on the page. The book is peppered with illustrations that give visual context to many of the maps and equipment devised by the cartographers, scientists, and inventors. I found myself down numerous Wikipedia rabbit holes whenever I’d see arcane place names in the periphery of the worlds known to the Greeks, Romans, or Carthaginians.
Naturally I had a good understanding of how most geographical systems and tools work — longitude and latitude, equinoxes, the tropics, time zones. What was a delight to read was the historical context in which these things were discovered or developed by people with little to no access to anything we’d consider “technology.” For millennia, making maps meant getting on a ship, horse, camel, or your feet, writing down what you saw, observing celestial patterns in the sky (or Jupiter if you were really clever), and tediously aggregating enough detail to make a representative picture of the world. Today we laugh at the distorted, backward views that scientists like Strabo assembled as his “known world,” but given the available resources, it’s honestly stunning anyone could map anything beyond their own village.
The world according to Strabo
Brown addresses this in the introduction, that the history of science is one of failure and persistence:
The history of science as a whole is the record of a select group of men and women who have dared to be wrong, and no group of scientists has been more severely criticized for its errors than cartographers, the men who have mapped the world. Hundreds of weighty tomes have been written to prove how very wrong were such men as Ptolemy, Delisle, and Mitchell. For every page of text, for every map and chart compiled by the pioneers of cartography, a thousand pages of adverse criticism have been written about them by men who were themselves incapable of being wrong because they would never think of exposing themselves to criticism, let alone failure.
As cartoonish and silly as most maps made prior to the Renaissance appear, the historical frame Brown assembles around these works gives a great appreciation to the struggles of the pre-modern cartographer’s reality.
Venturing Into the Unknown
For most of human history, the map of the world was really one of the Mediterranean Sea. We’ve all seen ancient maps with extreme distortion beginning only a few hundred miles from the Med coast. One of my favorite sections of the book is about the Phoenician pioneering of navigation and sea charts, one of the earliest forms of map that had practical use beyond the artistic. Rather than an academic approach to the development of charts, the Phoenician methodology was driven by necessity. As a trading civilization with origins in modern-day Lebanon, seafaring was essential to the growth of the empire, therefore the need for charts purely for livelihood was paramount. As far back as 1200 BC, Phoenician sailors were cruising throughout the Mediterranean and Adriatic, and are even thought to have circumnavigated Africa in 600 BC. The role their knowledge of geography played put them at the center of importance to dozens of neighboring civilizations, making them the first truly expansive “trading” nations:
They mastered many of the “secrets of the sea” and the more important secrets of the heavens, but just how much they knew about the sea and the universe as a whole, and how far they were able to develop the science of navigation, history does not say. Certainly the Phoenicians never said. Their skill and their willingness to sail where others dared not go gave them a peculiar power over more powerful nations bordering on the Mediterranean who depended on them to transport their merchandise and fight their naval engagements for them. They were indispensable to the great political powers. Sennacherib, Psammetichus, Necho, Xerxes, and Alexander all depended on them to maintain their supply lines and transport their legions.
But they left no written record of their knowledge. What we know about their contributions and extents of their exploits is through the marks they left on the places they visited. The lack of any left-behind documentation was likely intentional — they guarded intensely their knowledge of sea lore:
It was all the same to the Phoenicians. They knew what they had and guarded their secrets concerning trade routes and discoveries, their knowledge of winds and currents, with their lives. The influence of sea power began to manifest itself at an early date, and the Phoenicians were cordially detested in Greece if not elsewhere. They were also feared.
This brings to the forefront an interesting thread that runs throughout the story: the intimate connection between mapmaking, military intelligence, and corporate competitive secrecy.
War & Commerce Drive Discovery
A common theme with many advancements in science, not just geography and cartography, is the need for intelligence to defeat an adversary. War-making has a longstanding relationship with geography since the time of the Babylonians and Greeks, and still does today. Throughout the Age of Discovery, many of the modern inventions we still use todayfor surveying, navigation, and cartography — coordinate systems, projections, and more — were endeavors financed by kings and tyrants in service of conquest. Until most of the seas were explored and documented by the 19th century, the domain of cartography was divided between three main groups: private enterprise, government sponsorship, and commercial atlas publishers (who were only left with the scraps the other two didn’t care about, which wasn’t much). In the first two concerns, secrecy was a default — a necessary element to maintaining an edge over the market or the enemy. In the 17th century, the Dutch East India Company developed a “Secret Atlas” for the exclusive use of the Company. Like a Google or Apple of 400 years ago, they invested heavily in developing maps to leverage for commercial gain, employing their own cartographers to develop highly protected data. Though unlike today’s private enterprise, they saw no advantage from exposing any of their work to the public:
This remarkable lot of 180 maps, charts, and views was made for the exclusive use of the Company by the best cartographers in Holland. Included in the collection, and of the utmost importance, was a series of consecutive survey charts, which, when pieced together, show the fairway through the Indian Archipelago, the route to India along the coast of Africa and through the Indian Ocean, and the best course to China and Japan. In addition there were many single charts on a larger scale which showed in detail the small islands and atolls that played an important part in the hit-and-run battles on the high seas. There are Colombo on Ceylon, Bantam, Makassar, Atjeh, and the Portuguese stronghold of Goa; Ternate and Makian and the strategic outpost of Mauritius.
The ties were close between the East India Companies and their patrons in their respective governments. The explorers of the age were all funded by monarchs in search of claim-staking, empire-building, trade, and colonization. Navigators saw themselves as the “keepers of secret knowledge” when it came to fundamentals we consider givens today (even obsolete) — like the development of the astrolabe, the quadrant, celestial charts, and accurate marine chronometers for measuring longitude1.
The French were early pioneers in geodesy
The “Modern” World of Geography
Even in the modern era, for many decades governments were the only entities capable of bringing to bear the resources to map countries or continents. Today it’s easy to discount the monumental effort required to create a map of an entire country, since we have hyper-large-scale data accessible on our phones and watches. But for most of human history, knowing a place meant putting feet on the ground there. As late as the Second World War this was how mapping was done. Here’s Brown on the Allied strategy for gaining an edge on the Axis:
The fundamental data in many cases were not to be had by gift, theft, or purchase. A map is no better than the sources from which it is compiled, and too often the sources were not to be had, at least so far as the Allied nations were concerned. No amount of synthesis, scientific or artistic, no amount of high-speed printing on fine paper could remedy the fundamental lack, the basic objective of cartography — an accurate survey of the ground.
At the time of the book’s publishing (1949), the author couldn’t have imagined the world we live in now. Near the end, Brown sums up the current state of mapmaking as one driven by government bureaus and the post-war surge in the number of skilled surveyors, newly-minted after years of investment in the effort to supply mapping intelligence to warring nations around the world. Since the 1960s, the world of mapping has been propelled by the Space Age — from U-2 spy planes and Corona satellites during the Cold War to the Key Hole program that began for reconnaissance purposes and kickstarted the commercial satellite industry. While governments and militaries are still enormous contributors to Earth sciences and geography, private enterprise has taken the mantle of cutting-edge map data collection. All of us consume maps as a default behavior today, geotagging pictures, navigating with turn-by-turn directions, and searching for the next restaurant to visit happen as a matter of course. Machines are gathering data at a rate we aren’t even able to consume. For thousands of years, people were content if the could know only the physical space. Today physical geography is seen largely as a “solved” problem. We’re now able to map human movement patterns, financial transactions, weather, wildlife, events, and anything else that happens in space and time.
A Mine of Information
The bibliography is a treasure trove of further historical works. I still have to parse through it and flag other books that look interesting for further reading.
The one major critique I have of the book is its encyclopedic depth. If it were written today, much of the excruciating detail would be left on the cutting room floor, probably, but it’s bearable once your expectations are set. For certain elements of the history, I actually welcomed the level of detail. It prevented me from having to do further Googling to dig in on the parts I was more interested in. But quite a bit of it is unnecessary belabored.
I highly recommended The Story of Maps to the geographer with an interest in history. I haven’t found a better resource that starts at the true beginning. Most histories of science or cartography won’t go all the way to Anaximander and Strabo, but Brown showed no fear in devoting 100+ pages to the foundations of the science.
Dava Sobel’s Longitude is the canonical resource for that story. On John Harrison and his craft of chronometers. ↩
I swung through an Apple Store a couple of weeks ago to check out the new hardware. The Smart Keyboard Folio has been hard to imagine the experience with in reviews without handling one. Same with the Pencil. I was particularly impressed with the magnetic hold of the Pencil on the side of the device — it’s darn strong. The current Smart Keyboard has some deficiencies, as pointed out in this article. No instant access to Siri or at least Siri Dictation, no system shortcut keys for things like volume control and playback, and
Quillette always has good stuff. I’m on the side of the author here in general with respect to climate change: it’s a problem to be understood and responded to, but the loudest of the proponents of doing something about it propose massive, sweeping, unrealistic changes “or else.” This author and Steven Pinker (quoted in the piece) have the right idea. Take a long, optimistic view and look to history for similar circumstances, and take measured action over time.
I love analyses like this. Take the open GeoNames database, load it into Postgres, ask questions on patterns using SQL, visualize the distributions.
I wanted to find patterns in the names, so I explored if they started or ended in a certain way or just contained a certain word. With SQL this means that I was using the % wildcard to find prefixes or suffixes. So for instance the following query would return return every word containing the word bad anywhere in the name:
SELECT * FROM geonames WHERE name ILIKE ‘%bad%’
This makes me want to revive my old gazetteer project and crawl around GeoNames again.
We’re heading up next month to the American Geographical Society’s Geography2050 again this year, which will be my 4th one, and the 5th annual overall. It’s always a great event — a diverse crowd in attendance and a chance to catch up with a lot of old friends.
The last two years the AGS has hosted and led an OpenStreetMap mapathon in conjunction with the event to promote OSM as a tool in education. It’s organized and led by TeachOSM, and they invite 50+ AP Geography teachers from around the country to learn how to work with OpenStreetMap in their classrooms as a teaching aid. Alongside Steven Johnson and Richard Hinton (who do the real work behind TeachOSM), I’ll be helping out as a volunteer to lend my knowledge of OSM and its editing tools to the group.
I’ve always been a JOSM power user (like CAD for mapping), but I’m sure for this exercise we’ll do things with the built-in editor, iD, and maybe some HOTOSM mapping tasks for aid work. I’ll need to brush up on the latest and greatest with iD. I follow the project on GitHub and have seen tons of activity going on lately.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything in OSM at all, especially in a mapathon group setting. It’ll be a refreshing opportunity to get to do some mapping again and to support such a great cause to promote geography education.
Alan Feuer drives one of the continent’s most isolated roads over Alaska’s Brooks Range, from Livengood (population: 13) to the industrial oil camp of Deadhorse:
It was with these thoughts that I finally got to Deadhorse, which may rank as the most horrific place on planet Earth. If Stalin had built a gulag in the cargo area of Kennedy Airport, it would probably look like Deadhorse. The town, if you can call it that, is the apotheosis of petrochemical dismalness: a wasteland of oil tanks, acetylene fires, heavy-machine repair shops and spill-abatement companies that is drenched in freezing rain and pocked with muddy puddles, and where everyone I encountered wondered what in the world I was doing there at all.
Robert Draper spent time traveling the Congo River on barges that function as mobile cities to the hundreds of small remote villages along its shores.
Dawn hasn’t yet broken, but already coal fires are burning and women are frying beignets. Other passengers have risen from their foam mattresses and begun to lay out their wares for sale: soap, batteries, herbal potions, shoes, rancid whiskey. Soon visitors from deep in the bush will paddle up in their pirogues and hoist themselves spiderlike aboard the barges, bearing their own products to barter: bananas, catfish, carp, boas, baboons, ducks, crocodiles. The floating marketplace will proceed throughout the day, with as many as a dozen pirogues lashed to the boat at any given time. It soon becomes clear to us that the regimen is completely symbiotic and anything but frivolous. Absent this commerce, the passengers don’t eat and the villagers don’t have medication for a baby’s fever or a new pot to replace the rusted one.
It’s hard to appreciate how remote (and lawless) huge reaches of the river are. The Congo drains a basin equal in size to the continental United States east of the Mississippi.
Yesterday I read this fascinating piece on the state of Louisiana’s gulf coast. This slow, man-induced terraforming of the coastline is permanently eradicating bayou communities, and becoming a high-profile issue in the state. One of the author’s contentions is that the misrepresentation of the state’s ever-changing shape on official maps is a contributor to the lack of attention paid to this drastic situation. I love this use of correct maps as an amplifier of focus, to clarify what bad maps are hiding from the general population.
This issue of map miscommunication isn’t isolated to crises like the one happening on the Louisiana coast, it’s inherent in thousands of government-produced official maps both nationally and internationally. Some of the quotes in the article from GIS experts I thought did a good job demonstrating this fact, that old data tells lies:
He pulled up an aerial image of Pass Manchac, the channel between lakes Pontchartrain and Maurepas. On both the image and the Louisiana state map, the area appears to be forest. Anyone who has visited the flood-prone town of Manchac, about a 45-minute drive northwest of New Orleans, knows it is surrounded by wetlands. “People see the vegetation and the trees and think it’s land,” Mitchell said.
Where ancient natural processes of erosion and sedimentation collide with human influence — as in the canals, flood control systems, levees, and shipping channels in the bayous of Louisiana — it strikes a highlight through the age and inaccuracy of the maps on record. As a contributor in the article states, the various layers of government-produced data that are generally thought to be relatively static can be decades old:
His experience updating maps with digital tools has exposed how inconsistent existing maps already were. “The topographic layer might have been done in 1956, and the land cover layer was done in 1962, and the transportation came from 1945,” Mitchell said of his findings. “And those are some of the good ones.”
Keeping these sorts of data up to date is a costly affair, no doubt. But with a natural ecosystem as dynamic as that of southern LA, pretending that 50 year old data is good enough is an exercise in denial. The cartographer Harold Fisk created a map series in the 40s (featured in the piece) that shows a historical picture of the natural environment: a 200-mile wide swath of meandering Mississippi riverbed that was once used to spreading its southerly-transported sediment all over the southeast parts of Louisiana’s boot. This was massively disrupted when the Corps of Engineers rigidly fixed the riverbed shape of the river with dike and levee systems, to keep it from straying and affecting the extensive infrastructure and human settlement that runs along the riverfront from New Orleans to Natchez.
As drastic as the situation is, it’s one without a clear solution; it’s an issue of competing priorities, with completely opposite, but critical ends. Fixing the coastline and allowing renewed alluvial deposit to repair the missing land means tremendous impact on Louisiana’s oil and gas industry (one of the largest in the union). Doing nothing and keeping existing man-made infrastructure in place and unaffected means losing land at a lightning pace, not to mention the negative impact to the fishing industry up and down the coast (again, one of the nation’s largest producers). And with every passing year of the Corps’ nonstop work to control the river’s path, the risk of disastrous floods increases.
Last month at a GIS conference in New Orleans, I sat in on a talk given by Allison Plyer from The Data Center, a NOLA non-profit specializing in advocacy around opening and publishing civic map data for all sorts of local issues. She showed some of these maps published earlier this year by ProPublica in their “Losing Ground” series. I highly recommend the ProPublica maps, as well as The Data Center’s projects to showcase the human geography of greater NOLA, particularly their work post-Katrina.
A drilling accident in 1971 in Turkmenistan’s Karakum Desert created this 70 meter-wide crater, when a Soviet rig hit a cavernous pocket of natural gas.
The landmark, dubbed the “Door to Hell” by the locals has been continuously burning since, fueled by subterranean gas deposits. It’s now a local tourist attraction:
“Small roadside teahouses, known as chaikhanas, offer food and accommodation, with many also selling petrol and other supplies. Local families – who mostly eke out a living shepherding flocks in the area, and have yurts positioned close to the roads – also take in guests, and act as guides for the three-hour hike across the dunes to the crater.”
I’ve been reading a lot lately about sociocultural geography — about how people interact with their environments and with one another across space and time. This topic is more relevant than ever with today’s borderless conflicts, asymmetric warfare, and technology behind the scenes leveling the playing field for groups at all levels. On a journey across the internet reading and watching various things about human geography, I stumbled upon this fantastic piece by Adam Curtis on his BBC blog.
It tells the story and background of counterinsurgency doctrine from its inception in revolutionary communist China and Indochina to implementation in modern-day Iraq and Afghanistan. Fascinating stuff.
The post begins with some background on David Galula, the French military theorist popularly credited as the father of counterinsurgency warfare. During his time as a military attaché in China during the 1940s, he observed the tactics of Mao’s communist guerrillas, taking to heart the tactics used by the communists against the Kuomintang — in short, they turned the population to their side.
The meat of the article’s background on the history of counterinsurgency is seen in several documentary clips about the actions of the French government during Algeria’s War of Independence in the late 50s and early 60s. Galula and the French instituted an experimental “village reeducation” program in the Aures Mountains region (a refuge for opposition forces), with French soldiers living and working with the locals. Questioning and interrogation of the now-moderately-friendly villagers rapidly devolved into torture and cruelty.
If you could persuade the local people to come over to your side - then that would leave the insurgents who lived among the people drastically weakened. And that meant you could destroy them.
But to do that you had to identify the insurgents - and that meant getting information from your new “friends” the local villagers. But sometimes they didn’t want to give that kind of information, possibly because they were frightened, or they might even be an insurgent themselves, just pretending to be a villager.
And that led to the French soldiers finding ways to persuade the villagers to tell them who was an insurgent. It was called torture.
The first true American experiment with counterinsurgency tactics happened in the midst of Vietnam. Galula’s theories along with the work of a couple of economists (including Samuel Popkin’s The Rational Peasant) produced a hybrid approach to fighting in the jungles of Vietnam that fused Galula’s traditional battle for “hearts and minds” with “selective incentives” (i.e. money for information from villagers). After a number of village “pacification” experiments, the CIA’s Phoenix Program was put into place to not only identify friend from foe, but to target and kill the enemy. And just as in Algeria, the plan mutated into what some former participants describe as a “full blown torture and assassination campaign”.
The article wraps up with a clip of Petraeus in Baqubah, Iraq during the 2007 surge, reviewing the fruits of our revival of the counterinsurgency. The net long-term effects of the modern COIN approach remain to be seen, but let’s hope it doesn’t metastasize into the horrific programs of previous conflicts.
I think we still have a long way to go perfecting the right balance of support, direct involvement, and advisement — and in the messy, protracted, and stateless conflicts of today, we certainly won’t get anywhere with a standoff approach. Getting down in the trenches is a requirement.
For further reading, take a look an original research work from David Galula published by the RAND Corporation (originally published in 1963), analyzing the pacification campaign in Algeria. A couple other works I’ll be checking out along these same lines are David Kilcullen’s Counterinsurgency, and also the film The Battle of Algiers, which I’ve always wanted to see, and Curtis mentions in his article.
