Coast Lines: How Mapmakers Frame the World and Chart Environmental Change - Hardcover

Monmonier, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226534030 ISBN 13: 9780226534039

Verlag: UNIV OF CHICAGO PR, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

In the next century, sea levels are predicted to rise at unprecedented rates, causing flooding around the world, from the islands of Malaysia and the canals of Venice to the coasts of Florida and California. These rising water levels pose serious challenges to all aspects of coastal existence—chiefly economic, residential, and environmental—as well as to the cartographic definition and mapping of coasts. It is this facet of coastal life that Mark Monmonier tackles in Coast Lines. Setting sail on a journey across shifting landscapes, cartographic technology, and climate change, Monmonier reveals that coastlines are as much a set of ideas, assumptions, and societal beliefs as they are solid black lines on maps.
Whether for sailing charts or property maps, Monmonier shows, coastlines challenge mapmakers to capture on paper a highly irregular land-water boundary perturbed by tides and storms and complicated by rocks, wrecks, and shoals. Coast Lines is peppered with captivating anecdotes about the frustrating effort to expunge fictitious islands from nautical charts, the tricky measurement of a coastline’s length, and the contentious notions of beachfront property and public access.

Combing maritime history and the history of technology, Coast Lines charts the historical progression from offshore sketches to satellite images and explores the societal impact of coastal cartography on everything from global warming to homeland security. Returning to the form of his celebrated Air Apparent, Monmonier ably renders the topic of coastal cartography accessible to both general readers and historians of science, technology, and maritime studies. In the post-Katrina era, when the map of entire regions can be redrawn by a single natural event, the issues he raises are more important than ever.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Mark Monmonier is distinguished professor of geography at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and the author of many books, including most recently, From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Mark Monmonier is distinguished professor of geography at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

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COAST LINES

HOW MAPMAKERS FRAME THE WORLD AND CHART ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGEBy MARK MONMONIER

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Mark Monmonier
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-53403-9

Contents

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.....................................ix1 DEPICTION AND MEASUREMENT.....................................12 DEFINITIONS AND DELINEATIONS..................................133 NEW WORLDS AND FICTITIOUS ISLANDS.............................284 TRIANGLES AND TOPOGRAPHY......................................425 OVERHEAD IMAGING..............................................586 ELECTRONIC CHARTS AND PRECISE POSITIONING.....................707 GLOBAL SHORELINES.............................................868 BASELINES AND OFFSHORE BORDERS................................1029 CALIBRATING CATASTROPHE.......................................11610 RISING SEAS, ERODING SURGE...................................13111 CLOSE-UPS AND COMPLEXITY.....................................14712 EPILOGUE.....................................................163NOTES...........................................................167BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................................193INDEX...........................................................215

Chapter One

DEPICTION AND MEASUREMENT

On a top-ten list of mapped features, the coastline is a shoo-in for first place. Because the sea provides food, transportation, and recreation, the shoreline is at once a boundary, an attraction, a source of livelihood, and a hazard. On maps it reproduces the distinctive shapes of Africa and Cape Cod, and in textbooks and science magazines it reconstructs continental drift and dramatizes the changing climate's rising seas. A challenge to mariners and marine scientists, the coastline is raised and lowered twice daily by tides and occasionally realigned by storms, which famously shorten the shelf life of nautical charts, on which its representation demands careful measurement and prudent compromise.

Not all maps have a coastline. Whether a map has one often depends on its scale, which cartographers define as the ratio of map distance to ground distance. At a scale of 1:1 a map would be as large as the territory represented, and hopelessly cumbersome. At 1:87 it would shrink a minuscule part of the world to the detail of an HO-gauge model railroad-smaller than reality but large enough to show sidewalks and sewer lines. Most maps have much smaller scales. At 1:24,000 the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) topographic maps favored by hikers and earth scientists compress an acre of land into a tiny square barely a tenth of an inch on a side. Even so, mapmakers consider these maps large scale, while a 1:200,000,000 world map a mere eight inches across is unquestionably small scale. Small-scale world maps need coastlines to delineate continents, but less than half of all large-scale topographic maps include a stretch of seacoast.

Scale also affects the intricacy of cartographic coastlines, illustrated in this chapter by several maps for Five Islands, Maine, a tiny fishing village on Sheepscot Bay, thirty miles east of Portland. Marge and I rented a cottage there one summer when our daughter was young, and because we've been back a few times, I know the area well enough to appreciate the 1:24,000 USGS topographic map (fig. 1.1), which shows a settlement of roughly eighty buildings, mostly summer homes. (I enlarged this black-and-white excerpt to clarify symbols better differentiated in color on the original.) One of the tiny black rectangles represents our vacation rental, and another pinpoints the local "lobster pound" down near the dock, where the Thibodeau family sold the best take-out steamers on the Maine coast. Despite the simplified shoreline, I can recognize the narrow, rocky beach where Jo collected shells and flat pebbles. As a scale-model memory prompt, maps make excellent souvenirs.

Fine print at the bottom of the map sheet indicates that USGS mapmakers based their seaward coverage largely on the hydrographic measurements and shoreline features in figure 1.2, extracted from a nautical chart published at 1:15,000 by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, now the National Ocean Service (NOS) and part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Intended for maritime users, charts present a comparatively sketchy view of the land, usually only for a narrow belt along the coast. In this example, topographic detail stops at a coast road a quarter mile inland-no point in cluttering the map with symbols of limited use to sailors. By contrast, the seaward portion of the chart is rich in soundings (depth measurements), bathymetric contours (lines of equal depth), and other symbols that warn of shallow water where a ship could run aground.

On nautical charts the coastline is more than just a line. Pictograms identify rocky areas submerged at high tide, and asterisks locate isolated rocks alternately covered and exposed. South of Malden Island the label "Foul" identifies an area where individual hazards remain uncharted and anchorage is risky. The USGS map (fig. 1.1) includes some of the soundings and most of the depth contours, but the NOS chart highlights unsafe water with a darker blue and ropes off dangerous zones with dotted lines. And while the topographic map names all four larger islands (Crow, Hen, Malden, and Mink), the chart identifies only the two that can be labeled without disrupting hydrographic detail. Trade-offs abound in mapmaking, and on a nautical chart hidden dangers trump feature names.

To illustrate more fully the effect of scale, I juxtaposed the shorelines from these two large-scale maps with corresponding delineations from topographic maps at 1:100,000 and 1:250,000. As figure 1.3 shows, the 1:15,000 nautical chart accommodates not only a more detailed shoreline than its 1:24,000 topographic counterpart but a few additional tiny islands as well. By contrast, at scales of 1:100,000 and 1:250,000, islets disappear and the shoreline becomes smoother and more rounded. At the smallest scale (fig. 1.3, lower right) the markedly distorted footprints of the four surviving islands are more nearly similar in size, while Hen and Malden Islands, which are close enough to be connected by a footbridge, were pushed farther apart for clarity.

Displacement of features is common to coastal maps because a line symbol 1/50-inch (0.51 millimeter) wide at 1:250,000 represents a band 417 feet across on the ground-nearly seventeen times its theoretical width at 1:15,000. This leaves the mapmaker with three choices: amalgamate the two islands, shift them apart, or drop the smaller one. The 1:15,000 chart's more generous canvas accommodates numerous twists, turns, protuberances, and indentations, while the 1:250,000 topographic map must shoehorn an area 278 times larger into the same size frame.

Features that survive at smaller scales are often exaggerated. For example, the narrow inlet at the top of the 1:15,000 and 1:24,000 depictions becomes a distinctly wider incursion at 1:250,000. Why the map includes this feature is not obvious. Perhaps the cartographer who compiled the 1:100,000 topographic map thought the indentation dispensable, while the compiler of the 1:250,000 map, aware that appearances matter on reference maps, enlarged it to make the coastline look right. The smaller the scale, the greater the cartographic license.

Verisimilitude is particularly important for Maine's numerous long, narrow embayments,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF CHICAGO PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226534030
• ISBN 13: 9780226534039
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 228
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar