There so much fantastic material that has already been written about Tharp and her legacy (I’ve listed some at the end), but nowhere have I found the most signficant maps she helped to create gathered in one place.
So I have created a chronology of these ocean floor maps to show how they became some of the most well-known and influential maps of the twentieth century. I know there are a few I’ve missed that are in National Geographic atlases and on globes, but the fifteen below show the most comprehensive evolution of the ocean floor mapping work I’ve found to date.
In this book, award-winning journalist Peter Keating has assembled dozens of the most significant maps in history. There is the map featuring the Treaty of Tordesillas meridian, which Spain and Portugal used to divide the whole of the Western Hemisphere in 1494. The map deployed by Western leaders at the 1884 Berlin Conference to carve up Africa. A map of Adolf Hitler’s speaking engagements in 1933 that looks like a rock concert tour poster. Maps of gerrymandering. Of redlining. Of military targets and of peace treaties. The map of the world—distortions and all—that hangs on thousands of classroom walls. And the polarizing red-and-blue election results maps that Americans are confronted with every two years. In striking images and riveting stories that span continents and centuries, Keating makes a compelling case for why, in the age of the internet, the power of maps—to define borders, to influence social policy, to enact political change—is unmatched, and is as potent as ever before.
A collaboration between the California Geological Survey and the USGS, the Sierra Nevada Earth Science Atlas “provides the most detailed geologic framework mapping of California’s most iconic landscape to date. This web page hosts the numerous maps, data layers, and an associated report that make up the Atlas. Collectively, these layers and report show and describe the geology of the Sierra Nevada, a prominent mountain range that extends roughly north-south across eastern California and into a small portion of western Nevada, along with adjacent areas.” At the moment the Atlas consists of a geologic map plus appendices, along with a data package containing a number of map layers, with more to be added in the future.
In a blog post, David Smith discusses the challenges of getting good maps on the Apple Watch version of Pedometer++, version 8 of which shipped last month. “App design on watchOS is a really fun—but frustrating—challenge. You are designing for a relatively tiny screen, which must be operated one-handed. In this case, I want the user to be able to read the map and use it to navigate, while also having access to other workout-related information.” It involved years of iterative design, and a cartographer hired to create a custom base map layer.
Covering four distinct categories (“The Making of Boston,” “The Lay of the Land,” “Getting Around,” and “People and Culture” ), Andy Woodruff’s newly created, original maps investigate all facets of Boston’s past and present. In unraveling the many complex layers that comprise the “real” Boston, some explorations are expected: sports championships, universities, and pothole complaints. Others, such as the former cow paths that predated downtown streets, are decidedly more hidden.
Dig into the city’s history with a guided tour through Revolutionary War sites, landmarks of nineteenth-century Black Boston, and notable “first in the nation” events (like the first recorded UFO sighting). Uncover the structural forces that shaped the social and lived experience of Boston, with maps showing the impact of redlining, urban renewal practices, and the busing crisis of the 1970s. Discover how the city’s boundaries evolved through annexation and landfill and how they’ll continue to change due to coastal flooding risks. Explore some of Boston’s most unique quirks through surprising revelations about the density of Dunkin’ locations, the distinctive architecture of three-deckers, and the spread of the infamous Great Molasses Flood.
Andy previously co-authored the Bostonography site with Tim Wallace; in his page about his book he talks about what carried over from that project (only a few, actually) and what was new. Andy’s other work has been featured here several times before: start here.
Geoawesome’s Aleks Buczkowski looks at the art of Ed Fairburn, who combines portraiture with maps—basically, maps with a human face. “Fairburn’s work sits at the intersection of cartography and portraiture. It reminds us that maps are not just representations of space. They can also tell stories about people, identity, and place.” I covered Fairburn and his work back in February 2016.
It’s been ten years since Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman teamed up to form Voltron launch an occasional and irregular series of videos about maps. They called themselves the Avengers Map Men, and in each episode, sandwiched between the catchy theme song1 and the long ad break for Surfshark, they took as their subject an odd map or cartographic situation and proceeded to say a lot of smart things in a very silly fashion.
Now those videos have led to a book, This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (and Why It Matters), which came out last fall to no small amount of fanfare and promotion, and we get to see whether the schtick that works on YouTube is translatable to the printed page. It turns out that the answer is, kind of.
Latitude determines the angle of the sun’s rays and thus also the local climate. Earth scientists who reconstruct the climate of the distant past from traces in rocks therefore need to know where those rocks were located at the time. And that is often not the same place as today, because the tectonic plates may have travelled considerable distances. For example, geoscientists from Utrecht are studying 245-million-year-old flora and fauna in Winterswijk (The Netherlands), which lived in an environment very similar to today’s Persian Gulf: desert and tropical sea. Is that because global climate was so much warmer back then? Or was the Netherlands situated at the same latitude as Arabia? Six years ago, they had already demonstrated that the latter was the case.
For example, according to Paleolatitude my location (45°N) has held more or less the same latitude since the Cretaceous, but in the Carboniferous it was south of the equator. PLOS One article. [Tara Calishain]
Are geofence warrants unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? Geofence warrants require a data provider to provide information on all users and devices within a given area during a given time period. Their constitutionality has been a grey area for some time, with U.S. federal court decisions disagreeing with one another. One of those cases, Chatrie v. United States, is being argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court today (here’s the PDF of the petition), so we may soon have a definitive answer.
In the first edition of Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, two leading historians explored details of the 350-year history of African slave traffic to the New World. They showed, with nearly 200 original maps, where the captives came from, how long the journeys lasted, how many died on the voyages, and what the ports and destinations were. They also presented details about the trade itself, including the economics.
In this groundbreaking revised edition, 25 new maps locate the major language groups involved in the traffic and show the movement of Africans from the interior of the continent to the Americas, as well as from one part of the Americas to another. Accompanying the maps, as in the first edition, are revealing illustrations and contemporary literary selections, including poems, letters, and diary entries.
With up-to-date information drawn from the database Slave Voyages, with its records of more than 36,000 voyages, the atlas provides the fullest possible picture of the extent and inhumanity of one of the largest forced migrations in history.
