Geographic Oddities: A Sea or Not a Sea?

About five hours after the launch of Apollo 17, in the early morning hours of December 7, 1972, the astronauts of man’s final lunar mission turned their gazes back to Earth. Their capsule was positioned between the Earth and the sun, and from their God’s-eye view 28,000 miles overhead they saw a full hemisphere bathed in light and shining spectacular blue against the black void of space. The photograph they took of the scene is one of the most iconic views of our planet and has become famously know as the “blue marble”.¹ Take a look at a globe or a world map and you see mostly blue, and as we all learned as school kids, about 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by water. There’s even a term for all this water, the hydrosphere. Virtually all of the hydrosphere is part a vast connected world ocean; the oceans, seas, bays, gulfs, bights, channels, estuaries, firths, fjords, sounds, and straits, which despite the many names we give them, comprise a single body of water.² There is, however, one conspicuously massive body of water that isn’t part of this world ocean, the landlocked Caspian Sea.

For all you amateur geographers out there, the Caspian Sea presents a riddle of geography and definition. Is it a real sea, or is it just a big lake? What does the word “sea” actually mean, and speaking geographically, what is a sea really? I ask these questions because we humans love to classify, to put a blanket of order on the world. But let’s come back to this.

Is the Caspian a Sea or a Lake?

The Caspian Sea lies a few hundred miles east of the Black Sea along borders of Europe, central Asia, and the Middle East. Territorially it’s divided between Russia in the northwest, Azerbaijan to the west, Iran in the south, Turkmenistan in the southeast, and Kazakhstan in the northeast. It’s famous as the fishing grounds for much of the world’s sturgeon, the major source of caviar. Lately its oil-rich shores and seabed have become the crucial economic engine of the region (and a source of political tension among the surrounding countries). And it is a one-of-a-kind body of water.

You look in most atlases or encyclopedias and the Caspian Sea is listed as the world’s largest lake. Its maximum length (north to south) is 640 miles and its max width (east to west) is 270 miles. It covers an area of 143,000 square miles (371,000 square km),³ which makes it about the same size as Montana or all the islands of Japan, and bigger than Germany; it could easily accommodate all of the British Isles. It’s also really deep. The southern third of the Caspian is oceanic with a maximum depth greater than 3,300 feet. The total volume of water is about 18,800 cubic miles (78,000 cubic km).⁴ These dimensions dwarf all other lakes. By area the next biggest lake is Lake Superior (the greatest of the Great Lakes), which itself is huge with an area of a little under 32,000 square miles. But this is four and a half times smaller than the Caspian. In fact, the Caspian in larger in area than the next seven largest lakes combined.⁵ Just to emphasize the point, the Caspian is 50 percent larger than the combined area all of the North American Great Lakes. A comparison of volume tells the same story. The Caspian holds more than three times the water of the mile-deep Lake Baikal (the world’s most voluminous fresh water lake) and more than the next seven lakes combined.⁶

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Before we go further, a quick aside for definitions:

• Sea: (1) the salt waters that cover the greater part of the Earth’s surface; (2) a division of these waters, of considerable extent, more or less definitely marked off by land boundaries; (3) a large lake or landlocked body of water.

• Lake: a body of fresh or salt water of considerable size, surrounded by land.

These are dictionary definitions but they jive pretty well with wordier geographic definitions. And they don’t help us answer the question of whether the Caspian is a sea or a lake.

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The Caspian is so large that its shores touch on radically different climates. There’s the cold deserts of Kazakhstan the Turkmenistan, the arid Russian steppes, the high mountains of the Caucasus, the dry subtropical plains of Azerbaijan, and the lush, verdant subtropical forests of northern Iran. Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan is the largest city situated on the Caspian, but Iran’s capital Tehran and Russian Astrakhan⁷ aren’t too far removed from its shores.

Oil tanker on the Caspian Sea

The Caspian is an endorheic basin. That means it doesn’t have any outflows. Water comes in via rivers and streams but can only leave through seepage or evaporation. And like most other endorheic bodies of water (e.g., the Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea) it is salty. The saline concentration varies greatly, but on average it’s about as third as salty as typical ocean water. The Caspian is fed by the longest river in Europe, the Volga, which supplies 80 percent of the inflow. This is unusual because all of the world’s great rivers – except the Volga – flow into the world ocean. Many large rivers have their source in lakes, like the Nile at Lake Victoria and the Congo at Lake Tanganyika, but no others empty into one. The Caspian’s level is independent of the world ocean, and it’s the center of a large basin that sits below global sea level (presently the surface sits about 92 feet below sea level). In fact the geology of the southern part of the Caspian is oceanic as the seabed is oceanic crust and not continental crust.

Caspian Sea and Lake
So given all these facts, I’m going to argue that the Caspian is both a lake and a sea, a mini ocean. It’s a lake for the simple reason that it is landlocked; it’s distinct from the world ocean. It’s a sea because it’s huge relative to other lakes, salty like the sea (just not as salty), deep like an ocean, geologically oceanic (at least in part), ancient (it’s been there for 5.5 million years), and the outflow for one of the world’s largest rivers. If you compare the Caspian to many mediterranean seas (a sea mostly enclosed by land within distinct circulation patterns, hence the lower case “m”), it is about the same size (a little smaller) than the Black Sea and Red Sea, the same size and saltier than the Baltic Sea⁸, and much bigger than the Persian Gulf.

All of this is to say that the Caspian is two things at once, a sea and a lake, a sea-lake; it defies easy classification. And the more you look at our world’s geography, the more of these classification conundrums you find.

The Hottest Place on Earth

by Conroy

Burning Death Valley

For those of you who, like me, are interested in the extremes of our natural world, there is a new hottest place on Earth: Death Valley, California.¹ The record was set in the small town of Furnace Creek and now stands at a roasting 134 degrees Fahrenheit (56.7 degrees Celsius). What’s unusual about this record is that it wasn’t set this month or even this year, but way back in July 1913 (99 years ago). What’s even more unusual is that the new record is lower, less scorching², than the previous record of 136 degrees measured (not quite as) way back in 1922 at El Aziziya, Libya. As I’ve written about before, this 90-year-old record has been dubious from the start, and now the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has invalidated it.

Just to be clear, the record for highest temperature refers to air temperature measured in the shade. Temperatures in the sun can rise well above 134 degrees and ground temperatures heated by the sun can be higher still, almost to the boiling point. (In comparison, the hottest bodies of water tend to be merely warm, like bathwater.³) Getting back to El Aziziya, a quick glance at the map shows that it is located not deep in the Sahara where one might expect a record temperature to be recorded, but just 25 miles from the cool Mediterranean and its moderating breezes. This seems like an unusual place for the planet’s high temperature to occur. The WMO determined that the El Aziziya temperature was the result of the weather station being improperly placed on a black tarmac surface with the thermometer too close to the ground, and thus artificially increasing the measured high temperature. Further, the measurement was probably misread by an inexperienced record keeper. High temperatures measured before and after 1922 didn’t come close the record, lending support that the 1922 reading was an unlikely anomaly. The upshot is that El Aziziya no longer holds the record.

The Crucible of Death Valley
Death Valley is really hot. On July 11 this year the temperature peaked at 128 degrees, not exactly threatening the record, but close enough to tell you that in summer Death Valley is indeed a burning, fiery furnace, a sun’s anvil.⁴ But Death Valley is a place of extremes. Not only is it hot, but it’s also the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere, 282 feet below sea level, and the driest place in North America, receiving a little more than two inches of precipitation each year. It’s situated in eastern California and flanked on the east and west by high mountain ranges.⁵ Moisture from the Pacific Ocean is squeezed out of the air by the mountain ranges to the west of Death Valley, and the dry air heats as it sinks under cloudless skies, baking the desert floor. If your idea of hell is flaming heat, then summer in Death Valley is hell.⁶

There is a peculiar type of individual that chooses to test themselves in this crucible. Each year 80 or so runners participate in the Badwater Ultramarathon, which is described by the race organizers as the “world’s toughest foot race.” Ultramarathoners are a rare lot. These are endurance runners who take on races of 50, 75, 100 or more miles, running hour-upon-hour (and sometimes day-after-day) through exhaustion, pain, injury, and mental and psychological distress. For the runners, these races become tests of the body and soul. That’s why ultramarathoners will gulp thin air at high altitudes or suffer through frostbite in freezing winter cold or cross the cauldron of Death Valley in July. For most people, the effort required for an ultramarathon passes over the line from personal test and fitness goal to deranged masochism.⁷

A lonesome Badwater ultramarathoner

And it’s a rare ultramarathoner who can complete the Badwater race within the allotted 60 hours. To do so, you have to run over a 135-mile course across Death Valley and then halfway up the slope of nearby Mount Whitney. The race requires you to grapple with not only the deadly summer heat but lung-busting thin air at high altitude. So how does Death Valley treat these runners? In his winning debut, legendary ultramarathoner Scott Jurek stopped periodically to submerse himself in a man-sized cooler filled with ice water (each runner is attended by a team – the race itself offers no support – with food, water, medical help, emotional and psychological sustenance, and all other logistical support). The heat off the road can reach 150 degrees and actually melt shoe soles and burn feet and calves. The over-like air forces the body into a panic and blood to the extremities, trying in vain to keep the runner’s core from overheating. Dehydration and severe gastro-intestinal distress are par for the course. The conditions are so intense, and the body and mind so stretched, that runners often hallucinate, seeing mirages rise from the shimmering desert. Sounds pleasant doesn’t it?

Very few of us will ever run the Badwater race (or anything similar), but the summer conditions in Death Valley are so extreme that if you were left there with no water or relief from the sun, you’d be dead within a day or two.⁸

A Hotter Place?
No place on earth is hotter than Death Valley in summer, but it’s well north of the tropics and so is actually very mild in the winter. The average December temperature at Furnace Creek is a cool 52 degrees, and the record low is -9 degrees F (-22.8 C). There are other places on Earth that never get a respite from the high heat. Perhaps the hottest place on the planet by average temperature is found Dallol in remote far northern Ethiopia.

Dallol, like Death Valley, sits at the bottom of a deep depression, about 430 feet below sea level, in a dry desert. But unlike Death Valley, Dallol’s latitude is well within the tropics (just 14 degrees north) and so it cooks under an intense sun all year long. There was a salt mining operation at Dallol in the early 1960s. During that time the average yearly temperature was a suffocating 94 degrees, and the average daily high was 106 degrees. Today Dallol is uninhabited, the salt operation long since abandoned. It’s a place that, like Antarctica, is unfit for man.

Death Valley is home to only a few thousand people. But there are some major cities that experience extreme heat. Here are the record high temperatures for some of these cities: Kuwait, Kuwait (128), Khartoum, Sudan (127), Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (126), Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (126), Basra, Iraq (126), Phoenix, Arizona (122), Baghdad, Iraq (122), Bahrain (122), Doha Qatar (122), Karachi, Pakistan (118), Dubai, UAE (117), Tucson, Arizona (117), Las Vegas, Nevada (117), and Murcia, Spain (117).

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NOTES:

1. It’s more accurate to note that there is a new highest measured temperature on Earth because there’s no way to verify that the record measured air temperature at one weather station is a record for any time across the entire planet.

2. It would be inappropriate to write that the new record is “colder” than the previous record.

3. The warmest body of water (or the warmest part of the warmest bodies of water) is hard to determine, but candidates include the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, and Caribbean Sea. This of course ignores small geo-thermally heated bodies of water like geysers and natural hot springs.

4. Film buffs may recognize these descriptions from dialogue spoken in that ultimate desert movie (and cinema masterpiece) Lawrence of Arabia.

5. Here’s a neat piece of geographic trivia: Death Valley, the lowest place in North America is located just 85 miles from Mount Whitney (summit elevation: 14,505 feet), the highest mountain in the contiguous United States.

6. My idea of Hell is closer to Dante’s, a dark frozen waste. So for me hell on earth is to be found in coldest part of Antarctica, like for instance, the Vostok Station. But my ideas aside, summer in Death Valley is hellish.

7. I can recommend Christopher McDougall’s book Born to Run if you’re interested in learning more about what these races entail and what type of personality they attract.

8. The name of the place doesn't lie.

Visiting Key West

by Conroy

A view along Duval Street

Key West. What comes into your mind when you read those words?

How about a sunny tropical island? Key West is the only American city never to record a frost. Its warm climate, flat geography, and native flora are closer to that of the Bahamian cays than to the rest of Florida (let alone the rest of the continental U.S.). Walking slowly down busy Duval Street under the fierce July afternoon sun and through the still humid air, sweat seeping from your face and torso, you realize that Key West, unlike any other place in the U.S. is truly tropical.

What about a quirky laidback end-of-the-line town? Some of the locals call it Key Weird and the city has a long reputation for openness; Cuban immigrants, homosexuals, those just looking for a place to forget the past to start over, not to mention the hordes of pleasure seeking tourists (to name but a few groups) have given the island its own distinctive come-as-you-are and do-as-you-please culture.

Or maybe, if you’re geographically inclined like me, you think of the southernmost city in the continental United States? Let’s start with that. For those who haven’t been, Key West is the last island in the long chain of the Florida Keys, the archipelago that stretches in a hundred mile arc west-southwest from the southern tip of the Florida peninsula. The Keys rise from the shallow turquoise waters of the Straits of Florida and range in size from small, flat, forested islands to tiny coral specs. Key West city occupies the small Key West Island, which is just five square miles, as well as a few neighboring islands to the immediate east and north.

It’s hard to fairly distill a place in a brief description, but perhaps one famous landmark will help. Take a look at the photo on the right. This is the famous concrete bell at the intersection of South and Whitehead Street that marks the southernmost point of the continental United States. This bell makes for a great photo op and what you can’t see is the lengthy queue of people that are usually lined up during the day to get their pictures. Let’s linger on this monument for moment, and consider the four separate messages contained in its 18 words. They tell us a whole lot about Key West, or about how Key West wants to viewed by the outside world.

SOUTHERNMOST POINT CONTINENTAL U.S.A.

This is by far and away the Key West’s most celebrated claim to fame. It is the southernmost city in the contiguous U.S. Quick quiz: can you name the eastern-, western-, or northernmost cities in the continental U.S.?¹ Probably not, but you may know about Key West because residents have made the most of their geographic extreme, it’s part of Key West’s allure as an end point, the end of the road, mile zero, the furthest you can go. The thing is anybody who stands by this monument can see that it’s not actually located at the southernmost point on the island. The real southernmost point is just to the west on the U.S. Navy’s Truman Annex property where the general public can’t go. And this is a nice microcosm of Key West itself: almost the southernmost place. Key West is an island far from Florida’s mainland, so it really isn’t a part of the “continental” U.S. at all. I would suggest it’s more accurate to say that Key West is the southernmost point in “lower 48” states or even the contiguous U.S. Terminology aside, all of the uninhabited Dry Tortugas (islands that are also part of Florida) lie to the west and several to the south of Key West². So technically, Key West isn’t the southernmost point in the “lower 48”. It’s just the southernmost point that’s easy to get to.

And of course, it’s worth noting that all (or just about all) of Hawaii is farther south than Key West, and for that matter so is Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and almost all of America’s Pacific territories. Why am I harping on these technicalities? I mean who cares really?  It’s just this: the idea of Key West as the southernmost point in the U.S. – as a geographic extreme – is critical to the culture and atmosphere (and even the psychology) of the place. It doesn’t have to actually be the southernmost point, it just has to seem that way. Which leads to the next phrase.

90 MILES TO CUBA

Like the southernmost point, “90 miles to Cuba” is a well-worn phrase, and it’s more or less true (though in fact at the closest point Cuba is a little more than 90 miles to the south). Key West is significantly closer to Havana than to Miami³. And this phrase became commonplace during the Cold War and especially the Cuban Missile Crisis when Soviet nuclear weapons were being installed “90 miles” from the U.S. But what’s the big deal about this fact? I mean Bimini in the Bahamas is only 50 miles east of Miami. Monterrey, Mexico, and Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, Canada are all closer to the U.S. border. I think again, like the southernmost point, the idea that exotic Cuba is seemingly so close, just over the southern horizon, is important to the atmosphere of Key West: a place so distant and distinct from the rest of America that it’s like a foreign country.

And this may be hard to believe, but a few times as my girlfriend and I walked in the evening twilight, in and out of colorful shops, past raucous bars open to the street, under the darkening silhouettes of cruise ships that towered over dockside buildings, hearing many non-English voices, with the clinging, unrelenting heat, and wild palms trees and tropical vegetation overhanging the sidewalks, I did indeed feel, if only for a moment, that I was in some other country. A semi-America; not quite foreign, but disorienting and unfamiliar. Then something very American, like a loud pickup truck or the bright lights of a convenience store, would jolt me back. I was in America, Key West America, but America.

Sinking Cities

by Conroy

Baltimore flooded by Hurricane Isabel

Are America’s coastal cities facing a losing battle against the sea? Consider these facts from cities all along the U.S. East Coast: In Galveston, Texas, a long sea wall shields the city from the Gulf of Mexico. The sea wall worked for a century, but in 2008 the storm surge from Hurricane Ike overtopped the wall and flooded the adjacent streets. In the early 1980s Miami-Dade County spent $50 million to rebuild the eroding shore line of Miami Beach. Similar projects, officially termed “beach nourishment”, are common all along the Atlantic seaboard¹. In some precariously narrow sections of Hatteras Island, North Carolina, far off the mainland in the state’s Outer Banks, sand bags line both sides of the state route 12 to keep the Atlantic on one side and Pamlico Sound on the other from splitting the island. Back in 2003 when Hurricane Isabel roared up the East Coast, the island was split and an emergency project was required to stop the erosion and prevent the split from becoming permanent. Hurricane Isabel continued its movement up the East Coast flooding coastal areas of Virginia and as it moved inland its powerful storm surge funneled water up the Chesapeake Bay causing widespread flooding in coastal Maryland, and putting Baltimore, including downtown, under several feet of water. The flooding even extended far up the tidal Potomac to Washington, D.C. In 2011, the storm surge from Hurricane Irene flooded parts of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. Further north, Nantucket Island off of Cape Cod is literally eroding into the sea, taking pricey homes with it.

As these examples above demonstrate, being next to the sea has its dangers, and fighting the long-term trend of beach erosion and flooding are never-ending expensive battles. This situation is only going to get worse if a planet-wide trend continues: rising sea levels. Consider that just along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Jacksonville, Miami and Southeast Florida, Tampa Bay, and New Orleans are situated at least in part at sea level. And it’s not just major metropolitan areas that are at risk, the low-lying shores of the Houston shipping channel, just inland from Galveston, are home to one of the nation’s largest ports and lined with the nation’s largest concentration of petroleum refining plants. Are all of these areas destined to be inundated over the next century?

Sea Levels Rising
Of course the first thing that has to be answered is: Are sea levels actually rising? And to answer that, we need to understand what sea level is. Sea level is harder to define than it may seem because of course the flowing, undulating sea never seems to have one level. However, the most basic definition is the average surface elevation of the oceans when surface fluctuations, like high and low tides are averaged out. This seems like a reasonable definition but it nevertheless can be hard to pin down. Note that the average sea level of the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal is nearly eight inches lower than at the Pacific end. Still, it’s fair to say that there is a local “sea level” for all places where land meets tidal water. Historically these levels have been measured from set gauges on land, and more recently satellites have been used to observe global sea levels.

The results of these measures seem to confirm that sea levels are indeed rising all over the world. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)², global sea levels have been rising by about 1.8 millimeters per year (mm/yr.). If this estimate is in any way accurate, and indicative of a continuing trend (and not a rate that may slow or even reverse in the near future), there’s probably no need for immediate panic. At this rate it would take about 555 years for global sea levels to rise by one meter or about 170 years to rise one foot. This is hardly a catastrophic rate of increase. However, rising sea levels, whatever the rate, do pose an obvious risk to coastal areas. And many estimates, including those by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), put the annual sea level rise much higher than the IPCC.

But what causes sea level to change? On geologic timescales, ocean bottom elevations and plate tectonics play major roles. These occur so slowly that they don’t affect us. More important are short term causes like tides, onshore winds, atmospheric pressure, surface water temperatures, evaporation, precipitation, river runoff, and in extreme cases major storm surges and tsunamis. On the longer term sea levels can change because glaciers and ice caps shrink or expand. In the first case, melt water is freed from the land and adds to the volume in the sea. In the latter case, water is trapped in ice and global sea levels drop. Another long term trend is changes in land elevation due to groundwater depletion, erosion, or general geological subsidence. But it’s the melting glaciers and ice caps that have gathered most attention in recent decades, the result, many will claim, of rising global temperatures, which is in turn the result of man-made effects to the environment.

Melt water on the Greenland Ice Sheet

Man-made or natural, rising temperatures will melt snow and ice. If the entire Greenland Ice Cap were to melt, global sea levels could rise by as much as 24 feet. If the entire Antarctic Ice Cap were to melt global sea levels would rise by 200 feet. These are extremely remote possibilities, Greenland and Antarctica are really cold places and it would take many thousands of years for them to melt. And Arctic sea ice melting would have a negligible effect on sea levels because these ice packs are already floating on the sea. More likely is increased melting of ice on the periphery of Greenland and Antarctica, which could still result in several feet of sea level rise. Also, if sea surface temperatures increase, water density decreases and its volume increases. So higher sea temperatures result in higher sea levels irrespective of the contribution of more water (melted ice). It’s worth noting that global temperatures haven’t increased over the last dozen or so years, which is directly contrary to the predictions of climate models. If global temperatures do stabilize then sea water temperatures and ice cap/glacier melting may not be as significant an issue as many fear.

Now I don’t know if or how much global sea levels may be rising. Like all earth systems, the various components that affect sea level are complicated and combine in unexpected ways. For example, increasing global temperatures will lead to increased precipitation, which, if it falls in the polar regions like Antarctica, will actually increase the thickness of the ice caps and the amount of impounded water, which would lower global sea levels. However, higher temperatures should result in greater calving and icebergs breaking away from the subpolar regions, which would raise global sea levels. How might these two trends interact and which is greater?³ When you consider all of these components there has to be question of how measurements of these global trends can even be made and how accurate models of these global systems can be. Let alone what predictions for future developments are possible.

It’s also worth noting that many of the flooding examples cited at the beginning of this post were the result of major storms, which are not in themselves indicative of sea level rise. Never in my memory had Baltimore flooded from the sea like in 2003, and the Galveston sea wall had stopped all storms, including hurricanes, for a century. There’s plenty of room for debate about whether American cities face an impending crisis from rising sea levels.

Nevertheless, even if the global climate doesn’t warm appreciably over the next century, America’s coastal cities would be negligent to not prepare for rising sea levels and ever more frequent flooding. Sea levels appear to be rising slowing but consistently and this can’t be ignored. And as we consider coastal flooding, we should first turn from the U.S. East Coast to an ancient city on the Mediterranean.

The Ultimate Map

by Conroy

One of the first books my parents gave to me as a child was an atlas, a gift that I credit with kindling my life-long fascination with world geography. I loved the bright color maps of countries and regions I hadn’t even heard the names of before. I studied the accompanying photographs, charts, and statistics with great intensity. After that first atlas I couldn’t get enough, wallpapering my bedroom with the maps that came in National Geographic magazines, getting new and bigger atlases [1], and memorizing lists of the largest islands, longest rivers, most populous cities, etc. I think this all appealed to me because atlases and maps provide one way to imagine and relate to the rest of the world. Maybe it was this early childhood exposure, but for me the world is organized in my head as one big map, and everything else, cultures, languages, histories, places, current events, and even some memories, are just layers to be accessed from this underlying picture. Is this the way you think?

I’ve explained geography to others as having two fundamental components: (1) the physical reality of our world, like the oceans, great rivers, and high mountain ranges, and (2) the relationship of one place to another, like how Great Britain is separated from mainland Europe by the narrow English Channel. These fundamental components are, well, fundamentally important to the long development of human civilization and the common facts of everyday experience. San Francisco has its remarkably consistent temperatures because of its location on a peninsula adjacent to the Northern Pacific and the cool California Current that flows along America’s west coast. Great Britain avoided invasion in World War II because Hitler’s war machine lacked the naval craft to cross the 20-mile wide Straight of Dover. India and China border one another but their civilizations have little in common because they’re physically separated by the highest mountain range on Earth. Geography is central to these facts. The story of history and the interactions of civilization are substantially informed by the geographical relations of people and places; that’s what the term geopolitics means. And the facts of everyday life, the language you speak, the weather you experience, the types of outdoor activities you participate in are inextricably linked to geography.

The wonderfully stylized London Underground map

Anyway, for me, it’s the results of geography, the histories and cultures and climates and sights, which make maps, our most basic visualization of geography, so endlessly interesting.  In fact, my girlfriend finds it amusing that even now whenever I’m confronted with a map I can’t resist studying it with terrific focus. And maps are more than functional tools, they can also be art. A few years ago the Walter’s Art Museum in Baltimore had a wonderful exhibit on maps. It included ancient tapestries of the then known world to the modern stylized depiction of the London Underground system. And it’s hard to not appreciate the clarity and simple beauty of the London Underground system map or the wonderful detail and color of the (very best, in my opinion) road maps provided by companies like ADC [2].

An ADC road map of Washington, D.C.

A Mapping Revolution
There’s only one drawback to traditional maps – they’re static. Any given map is set at one scale and depicts just one area (even if it’s the whole world). You need an entire book (an atlas) to show maps of different locations, details, and data, and that still doesn’t allow for reader configuration of the format or content. But the internet, smart phones, and the massive proliferation of information is changing all that, and more interestingly, proposed enhancements from Google and Apple might take maps to their fullest expression.

Starting in the 1990s Mapquest and other sites began to offer digital maps, usually for road directions. I didn’t care for these maps because you could only see an area the size of your computer monitor and the maps themselves were rather dull to view. But when Google Maps came out in the early 2000s the aesthetics began to improve and over time they have added important enhancement like an ability to scroll across the entire globe, zoom in an out for greater or less detail, and new layers providing satellite imagery and terrain.

Google’s companion Google Earth application added the ability to change perspective and included 3-D buildings in major cities. Later Google added Street View shots taken from cars mounted with cameras providing 360 degree views that let you actually see – not imagine – what a place looks like. This is a massive shift, converting a map to a far more sensory and immediate experience. Now it’s possible to view, say, the streets of Rome without ever having traveled there. Certainly this is no substitute for actually being there in person, but it does bring views of places all over the world right onto your computer screen.

Other functions allow you to toggle on features like up-to-date traffic information, user photos, labels, and links to Wikipedia articles. And this doesn’t even touch on the powerful linking of maps with GPS, which shows you just where you are and can direct you to just where you’re going, anyplace and anytime. Now Google has announced that they plan to add even more functionality to their maps, including more 3-D buildings and street view shots taken by pedestrians of places where cars can’t go, allowing a user to view cities as if they were in a helicopter, or see nature along hiking trails from thousands of miles away.

These changes have been added incrementally over the last decade so you might not realize just how incredible they really are. No longer are maps 2-D static views limited to a specified area and providing limited information. Google Maps, and probably Apple’s soon to be released map application, provide users a map or satellite photo of any place on the globe, street-level views along a growing network of roads and soon along non-road areas of interest, links to encyclopedia articles, and access to real-time information like traffic conditions or the proximity of coffee shops. And you can do it all from you mobile phone. Enhanced views, more information, and real-time data; that is a mapping revolution.

I wrote above that in my mind I view the world as a large map with much of my knowledge and experience layered onto the underlying structure. Aren’t these new and improving interactive digital maps getting closer and closer to this mental image? The more functionality that is added, the more information is linked, the closer we get to a version of a map that I could have only dreamed of as a child.

Maps as Art

If there is one area where static maps still beat their digital cousins is in presentation. Static maps, done well, are far more visually appealing than Google Maps or any other product available on the internet. There will be no museum exhibits showcasing digital maps (at least not in their current form). And there is an inherent limitation to maps that are restricted to showing only an area the size of a computer monitor or the even more restrictive smart phone screen. I have little doubt that Google and Apple will continue to improve the visual presentation of their map programs, but who can say if they’ll ever be as good as a printed version. I still have a large map of the United States hanging on my home office wall and I still find myself studying it from time to time. Next to my office desk are several atlases and I do occasionally pick them up and flip through their pages. But it’s to the computer I mainly turn for maps now. The functionality of digital maps is just too useful. Hopefully one day the style will match the substance, and then we might really have the ultimate map.

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NOTES:

[1] Including an old one my uncle had from the late 50s that included a lot of post-World War II/early Cold War names and notations and anachronisms like Japan regaining full sovereignty after the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco or South Africa still ruling Namibia (or Southwest Africa as labeled).

[2] Whose motto is “The Map People.”

Shifting Americans

by Conroy

Bright big Dallas

Locals say everything is bigger in Texas, and maybe no place exemplifies this boast more than Dallas – “Big D” – a booming metropolis of well over six million people spread over the flat north Texas grasslands [1]. Examples of bigness: the city is home to the world’s largest domed stadium, along with one of the biggest and busiest airports, and many of the nation’s “mega-churches”. Fulfilling its reputation, metro Dallas has grown to become America’s fourth most populous urban area [2] and the nation’s sixth largest economy. An evening drive south along I-75 towards the city (inside an air-conditioned car which repels the smothering summer heat and humidity), reveals Dallas in all its vibrancy and excess. Starting around Allen, 25 miles or so from downtown, you enter into Dallas’ suburban sprawl: shopping malls, box stores, business parks, mid-rise towers, tract housing developments, and fast food restaurants flanking both sides of the freeway; your eyes dazzled by the sea of house lights, glowing colorful business signs, the pale orange twinge of sodium-streetlights, the alternating white-red of countless vehicle head-and tail-lights. Miles and miles later you can glimpse downtown, tall chromatically lit glass towers glinting in the fading twilight. It’s all new, pretty-ugly, dynamic-gaudy, impressive-bland, a 21^st century American city.

What a contrast to the Dallas of my parents’ youth, then a quiet mid-size southern city made infamous by an assassination. Contrast the blandness of Dealey Plaza (which looks much the same as it did in 1963 [3]) with the glitzy modern hustle of the nearby downtown. Dallas is emblematic of what seems to be a continuing fact of America; it’s ever shifting, moving, resettling population. It’s a source of some amazement to me how fluid and dynamic the American people remain, after nearly two-and-a-half centuries of nationhood, in where they choose to live. I think this can be demonstrated by two graphics.

Where Americans Lived in 1950
First, a map showing the largest urban areas in 1950:

In 1950 the U.S. population was 151 million, 6 percent of the world total. Well over a third of the population (36%) lived in rural areas, and as the map above shows, big cities were few and outside of the Northeast and Midwest, widely scattered.  Just one city, New York, had more than 10 million people. Chicago, then still America’s “Second City”, was the only other city with more than 5 million people. Just five other places had more than 2 million: Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, and San Francisco. Only five others cities, St. Louis, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Washington, and Baltimore had more than 1 million. The above map shows whole swathes of the country from the South, to the Mountain West, the Pacific Northwest, and desert Southwest bereft of large cities. Miami, Atlanta, Phoenix, Seattle, Denver, and San Diego didn’t even rank. Dallas and Houston were mid-size.

Largest Urban Areas in 1950
Rank	City	Metro Population	Rank	City	Metro Population
1	New York	12,600,000	11	Washington, D.C.	1,287,000
2	Chicago	5,208,000	12	Baltimore	1,162,000
3	Los Angeles	4,250,000	13	Minneapolis	987,000
4	Philadelphia	3,297,000	14	Buffalo	895,000
5	Detroit	2,884,000	15	Dallas	855,000
6	Boston	2,301,000	16	Milwaukee	829,000
7	San Francisco	2,131,000	17	Cincinnati	813,000
8	St. Louis	1,541,000	18	Houston	701,000
9	Cleveland	1,425,000	19	Kansas City	698,000
10	Pittsburgh	1,400,000	20	New Orleans	660,000

Source: Peakbagger.com

In 1950 the most populous state was New York with a little less than 15 million people (10 percent of the nation’s total); more than double the population of Texas and five times more than Florida. Over half the American population lived in a contiguous band of 15 Midwest and Northeast states [4], which together comprise just 15 percent of the total national land area. These are the states that were (1) well-settled, they all were admitted to the Union before the Civil War, (2) were home to America’s largest industrial centers, which in 1950 accounted for nearly 30 percent of the American economy (e.g., Detroit and Pittsburgh), and (3) were not hampered by the segregationist and discriminatory policies that caused the American South to languish for more than a century after the Civil War [5].

The least populous state was Nevada with just 160,000 people, and less than 50,000 of those lived in and around the new city of Las Vegas. Keep in mind an alternative statistic, baseball in 1950, still then very much America’s most popular sport, didn’t field a Major League team west of St. Louis or south of Washington [6].

Where Americans Lived in 2010
Now, a map showing the largest urban areas in 2010 (just sixty years – less than a lifetime – later):

The first thing that strikes you about this map is the impressive proliferation in the number of large cities. In 1950 there were 12 cities with metropolitan populations of 1 million or more, in 2010 there were 51. This is the result of two trends. First, by 2010 the U.S. population had more than doubled since 1950 to 308 million (5 percent of the world total) [7]. Second, the shift from rural areas to urban areas continued and in 2010, 82% of Americans lived in urban areas. So by 2010 there were more and bigger cities.

Geographic Oddities: The Exclave

by Conroy

The Kentucky Bend

The Mississippi River flows in a meandering path across its wide, flat floodplain; appearing on the map like a slack garden hose, twisting and turning and practically looping back upon itself for the whole of its long and broad lower course below St. Louis. One the most notable bends occurs not too far south of where the Ohio River enters the main channel, and the south flow abruptly reverses and the river turns north and bends omega-like [1] in a counter-clockwise semicircle before returning to its southern course. In this location the river practically surrounds a little spread of land called the Kentucky Bend. What’s notable about this barely populated patch of fallow cotton fields is that is lies totally disconnected from the rest of the Bluegrass State. From here, a look across the Mississippi in any direction (east, north, and west) is of Missouri, and the only land access is from the south through Tennessee. The Kentucky Bend is an example of one of those geo-political oddities: the exclave [2].

There are examples of exclaves all over the world, and they tend to exist in locations where geography, history, and politics have combined to leave a portion of a state or nation where you wouldn’t expect it to be. The stories behind these exclaves are often interesting, and common sense may suggest that they not exist. Why isn’t the Kentucky Bend part of Tennessee, or even Missouri [3]?

First, what am I calling an exclave?  Definitions vary, but to me exclaves are geographic areas of one state or country that are physically separated from the bulk of their home state/country, requiring transit through (or over) another state/country, unless the separated place can be accessed via the open sea. If you can’t drive or walk or ride or fly or sail there without going through another place, it's an exclave. By this definition, Alaska isn’t an exclave of the United States. Sure it’s physically separated from the rest of the country, but planes and ships can transit between the “lower 48” and Alaska without going through Canadian territory. In the same vein, Hawaii, or any other island distant from the mainland, isn’t an exclave. 

Consider a few prominent examples (of dozens) of true exclaves from around the globe:

Straight Lines
A ninth-grade biology or Earth sciences student could tell you that nature doesn’t use straight lines; however, mankind loves them. Just compare man’s architecture to nature’s landscapes. As a consequence, our un-straight Earth, where even the flat horizon of a dead calm sea creates a circle, is divided into political units by straight lines drawn on flat maps. When this happens sometimes you end up with unexpected results. The U.S./Canadian border provides a great illustration of this point.

Point Roberts, Washington

Today it might seem strange that the rather tranquil boundary between the United States and Canada – the longest “unguarded” border in the world – was a place of longstanding and bitter dispute during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A new and growing America vied with Britain for control of the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence River, and the vast interior west of the North American continent. These disputes were settled, peacefully for the most part, resulting in what is today the longest international land border in the world [4]. All of the disputes and agreements, treaties and tribunals decided matters on a macro scale, which produced no less than seven exclaves along the border:

• Point Roberts, Washington on the Strait of Georgia and connected by land only to British Columbia.
• Elm Point and Northwest Angle, Minnesota in the Northwest Angle of Minnesota but connected by land only to Manitoba.
• Province Point and Alburg, Vermont on Lake Champlain but connected by land only to Quebec.
• Saint Regis, Quebec on the St. Lawrence River but connected by land only to New York.
• Campobello Island, New Brunswick which is only connected to land, via a bridge, to Maine.

A glance at the map shows that these places would more logically be part of the nations that they are physically attached to. But politics and history means that will never come to pass.

Straight lines similarly separate most U.S. states and Canadian provinces, creating exclaves in both countries. A few of note:

• Knott’s Island, North Carolina which is actually connected by land to Virginia.
• Eastern Shore of Virginia which is separated from the rest of the state by the lower Chesapeake Bay and connected by land to Maryland. However, its exclave status was largely eliminated when the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel was completed in 1964, which now connects the eastern shore across the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay to Virginia Beach.
• Lost Peninsula of Michigan, which is actually connected by land only to Ohio.
• Cold Lake, Alberta where a spit of land near the town is actually connected by land only to Saskatchewan.

The March of History

Colorful West Berlin

There is more than orderly (if arbitrary) lines that create exclaves, unexpected historical developments are often a cause. Take Berlin after World War II. The city like the rest of Germany was partitioned between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. Eventually the western controlled areas, West Berlin, emerged as a capitalist, democratic exclave surrounded by East Germany (and East Berlin). The vulnerability of this exclave was revealed when the Soviet Union, in one of the first overt acts of the Cold War, closed the land link between the city and West Germany in 1948. The city was then supported by a massive American-British airlift that lasted nine months until the Soviets reopened the ground links to the city. Later, West Berlin became a focal point for Germans fleeing the communist East. The exclave vanished in a good way when the two German nations reunified in 1990.