Somehow I got from trying to find my way across Berlin to several hours traipsing up the Tanami Track and across the desert in South Australia and the Northern Territory. Along the way I found a couple of impact craters, marvelled at the astoundingly and diversely complex geological processes across central Australia, followed dry, braided rivers to their inland deltas, seasonal lakes and waterways, found airport runways, a scrawl of tracks, trails, roads, paths that faded in and out, cattle stations, groups of houses, mines, diggings, scratchings, was amazed at the quantity of signs of human existence in the blankness, more amazed still by the utter beauty of the land, realised it looked a lot like my favourite kind of art and some of the stuff I was doing a while ago, and I was better just to take screenshots than a paintbrush, also that I am unlikely to ever see this land from the ground, and to see it like this, from surveillance satellites mapping the planet down to metre-resolution is something I’ll never experience.
Tag Archives: Cartography
I also wanted to include mermaids and shipwrecks …
Continuing my current science bender, a piece of reblogging from Barista on Marie Tharp, Cartographer, scientist, one of those people who seem to confound easy categorisation, and in doing so make intellectual leaps that change the world.
As details of the ocean floor emerged, Tharp noticed a fascinating feature. A well-known mountain range running down the Atlantic, known as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, appeared as expected. But as Tharp’s careful drafting made clear, there was also a valley that ran down through the middle of the mountain range. It was a hugely important geophysical feature; this “rift valley” marked a dynamic seam in the crust of the planet, the boundary of huge continent-size plates where new portions of crust rose from the interior of the earth to the surface like a conveyor belt and then, in a geological creep known as “drift,” moved outward in both directions from the midocean ridge.