Shifting Perspective

The dirt track between vineyards on the shores of Lake Geneva looked nothing like a road, but my GPS system insisted this was the way to my destination. As it turned out, the tractor-rutted road did lead to my friend’s house, but the route was neither the most direct nor the best maintained. On my map, though, it looked like any other road. The GPS offered no insight into how the situation looked on the ground, but the horse-back riders were visibly annoyed that I had chosen this quiet local path instead of the regular street, just out of sight beyond the closest field.

Wyeth, map, discovery, cartography, 16th century

Map of Discovery (1928): This 1928 map depicted the political boundaries of the time, created in the style of 16th century mariner’s charts.
Artist/Source: N.C. Wyeth/National Geographic

This post itself might ramble a bit off the trail–I don’t really have a clear map for where it’s going. I know how to read the kinds of maps I grew up with, the flat ones with lines, the ones on spheres. But as it turns out, those were never really accurate.

The dimensions were off from the beginning. We all know that Africa is much, much larger than Greenland or North America, but somehow, the older maps made them all look remarkably similar in size. And although the Earth is a sphere floating in space, most global maps were printed from a perspective that always put the North at the top.

A map developed by Hajime Narukama in 2016 approaches those problems be re-orienting a map that isn’t defined by north and south. What we get is a variety of maps in which the Earth can be viewed from any point of departure – a map of the world as seen from Peru, or Tonga, or Hawaii. It’s surprising just how disorienting it is.

authagraph, cartography, Narukama, globe,

Authagraph map (2016).
According to its creator Hajime Narukawa, the AuthaGraph map “represents all oceans, continents including Antarctica which has been neglected in many existing maps in substantially proper sizes. These fit in a rectangular frame without interruptions and overlaps.”
Source: Interesting Engineering

One thing about the old, traditional maps was that they had skewed perspectives that were more suited to navigating across seas (their main original purpose, I guess) than understanding a place that’s been a part of a culture’s history forever (like these amazing Inuit navigation maps made of wood).

Another thing was that even early navigational maps portrayed places as the map-makers wanted others to see them. Early European maps of the New World painted a picture of the resources there for the taking, and the strangeness of the people who lived there, as if there had been no history before these maps were made. As territory was mapped, maps were used to define the territories, the ownership, the laws.

It’s said that history is written by the victors. Well, the same might be said of traditional maps. (Online maps, it could be argued, are written by advertisers, but that’s a post for another day.)

It’s one thing to see a place on a map; it’s entirely another to be in that place. Sometimes, we need a completely different kind of map.

There’s been a project underway for several years to redraw the maps of traditional Zuni lands in the American Southwest. Called counter-maps, the maps are intended to “reclaim the names of Zuni places and depict the land of the A:shiwi as they know and see it, immersing the viewer in a landscape interwoven with culture, story, and prayer.

Counter-mapping, cartography, Zuni, Colorado River, Larson Gasper

Little Colorado River (2009)
Artist/Source: Larson Gasper/Emergence Magazine

Will these maps help you find a specific town? Definitely not if you don’t already know where it is. That’s kind of the point.

I recently learned of a study that looked into how migrating birds find their way across continents, something we humans have only been able to do with any kind of accuracy for a fairly short time. Yet birds can aim for specific beaches on either end of the planet. What do their maps look like?

An international team of researchers has found that some migratory birds are using a magnetic navigational map, an internal compass that allows them to know where they are in terms of longitude. The study suggests that this internal magnetic map (which might be shared across many other species besides birds, such as turtles) could be combined with the experience of making the journey with adult birds, the night sky, and perhaps even smells, to provide guidance to animals finding their way to summer and winter grounds.

Migration, map, warblers, cartography, magnetic fields

Magnetic Intensity and Magnetic Declination Form an Excellent Bi-coordinate Grid in Some Parts of the World.
The map shows magnetic declination isolines (red; degrees) and total intensity isolines (blue; nT) based on US NOAA National Geophysical Data Center and Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. The breeding range of Eurasian reed warblers is shown in yellow. The black curve indicates the autumn migratory route of a typical Eurasian reed warbler from the Baltic region based on ringing recoveries.
Source: Nikita Chernetsov, et al./ Forbes

This is the visualization that the researchers made of the magnetic map possibly used by the reed warblers used in the study.

I wonder if we could even comprehend what a reed warbler’s map might really look like. In any case, it would be much closer to the Zuni maps of memory and story than our maps of lines and dots. There must be so much data and knowledge built into every little warbler’s mind map of the world.

What kind of map would the locals of the Swiss village where I drove down the wrong road make that could have kept this stranger from getting lost in the vineyards? What kind of map would chart the place memory of my old French village for all the newcomers and old-timers?

What if our maps could transcend their supposed objectivity and truly chart Memory Lane?

Counter-mapping, cartography, Zuni, Duane Dishta

Journey of the Zuni Ancestors to the Land of Everlasting Summer (2008)
Artist/Source: Duane Dishta/Emergence Magazine

 

 

 

 

Embroidered Learning

I had to learn two very different skill sets as a girl: needlepoint and geography. Who would have thought that at one time, girls were expected to learn the two together? What an unexpected interdisciplinary education!

needlepoint, solar system, quilt, cartography, history, needlepoint, embroidery

Solar System Quilt (1876)
Wool, cotton, silk.
Made by Ellen Harding Baker
Source: National Museum of American History

Among the women in my family, right up to my generation in the 1970s, needlework and yarn work were considered part of a girl’s education. Cross-stitching, needlepoint, embroidery, crocheting, knitting, darning, quilting – I had my own set of embroidery hoops, knitting and crochet needles, a range of needlepoint needles and a rainbow of thread by the time I was 10. And yet, my grandmother was disappointed that my lace-making skills had been completely neglected – a real shortcoming on the part of my mother, who to my knowledge never finished a single project. Mom hated every stitch, but it was just something she had been expected to do – and she expected me to have the same skills.

needlepoint, globe, cartography, history, needlepoint, embroidery

A Map of the World from the Latest Discoveries (c. 1790-1815)
Silk embroidery on silk backing.
Made by Mary Ann Wood.
Source: George Glazer Gallery

What else did we have to learn? Geography. Specifics for the United States, generalities for every place else. I still know my Fifty Nifty United States song to help memorize all fifty states in the Union – drilling the names of the capitals and main rivers of each state was a prerequisite to finishing fourth or fifth grade. I remember enjoying poring over our Atlas of the World, a massive tome that required its own shelf. Back then of course, it was all drawn maps on printed paper, not satellite images on a screen.

But if needlepoint and textile abilities have always been expected of girls – as much to keep them busy as for practical reasons – then geography and education were out of their reach for a very long time.

A book I discovered after seeing the globe below explains how the two unlikely subjects came together. Judith A. Tyner’s book, Stitching The World: Embroidered Maps and Women’s Geographical Education, describes how

From the late eighteenth century until about 1840, schoolgirls in the British Isles and the United States created embroidered map samplers and even silk globes…that were designed to teach needlework and geography. (…)The events of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries stimulated an explosion of interest in geography. The American and French Revolutions, the wars between France and England, the War of 1812, Captain Cook’s voyages, and the explorations of Lewis and Clark made the study of places exciting and important. (…)In this light, map samplers and embroidered globes represent a transition in women’s education from ‘accomplishments’ in the eighteenth century to challenging geographic education and conventional map drawing in schools and academies of the second half of the nineteenth century.

needlepoint, globe, cartography, history, needlepoint, embroidery

Globe sampler (1815)
Ink and silk embroidery on silk and wood.
Made by Ruth Wright,
Westtown, Pennsylvania
Source: Common Destinations

I’m assuming that boys of the period were simply given pencil and paper to learn geography – then as now, I have a hard time imagining them being given a needle and thread and expected to make a map.

At any rate, the good news is that these artefacts survived, and offer us a wonderful window both into women’s crafts, and the history of cartography.

 

Stone Cold Facts

Switzerland just experienced its coldest winter in thirty years; back in October, several meteorologists predicted this winter would be Europe’s coldest in a century. From my vantage point on the Franco-Swiss border, where temperatures didn’t get above freezing and were further chilled by a strong northerly wind, I can testify that January was desperately cold for our region. These are some local effects of a warmer Arctic, a slower jet stream, and the resulting stationary cold fronts.

But how do we know all this? Because we’ve been keeping meteorological records for decades and have further records based a variety of environmental investigations. While a few decades worth of temperature recordings might not be much along the vast time line of the planet, they do give us insights into directions, movements, influence. Without these records, we are cut adrift into speculation.

Record-keeping of environmental data is how we can move beyond the snapshots of the time in which we live to gain an overview of our world as it evolves, of our impact on it.

Tsunami stone. Photo: Roselinde Bon/Flickr

Tsunami stone.
Photo: Roselinde Bon/Flickr

And so it was with dismay that I read of various environmental agencies and national parks being muzzled as one of the first orders of business under the new U.S. administration. From the Environmental Protection Agency to every national park to NASA to the Department of Agriculture, public access to public science was restricted, while government scientists were prohibited from communicating with the very taxpayers for whom they work. A memo announced that all studies, papers, publications and grants would be reviewed for approval by the incoming administration. It’s possible this is just a prelude to massive de-funding.

Offhand, I would guess that this is an outgrowth of the new administration’s less-than-enthusiastic support of the science behind climate change, and that a blanket gag order is one way to control a large, ongoing conversation between scientists and the public. Without regular record-keeping, otherwise known as data gathering, we are blinded.

For data to be politicized for immediate or short-term goals is to put society in peril of running headlong in the wrong direction. As an example, the new administration has also just removed regulations that restricted the dumping of coal mining waste into rivers and streams; without regular monitoring of water quality and access to this data, who will know in eighteen months how water quality has fared?

Record keeping is how we humans remember. Whether through oral history, parchment paper, printed studies or virtual data memory, this is how we find our way forward by knowing what came before. Our collective access is greater than ever before, provided it’s not suppressed for ideological and commercial expediency.

 tablet in Aneyoshi, Japan, warns residents not to build homes below its location. Photo via: Fackler/Bend Bulletin

Stone tablet in Aneyoshi, Japan, warns residents not to build homes below its location.
Photo via: Fackler/Bend Bulletin

Back in 2011, the great Tōhoku earthquake and ensuing tsunami swept across the Sendai province of Japan like a scythe. It was the largest earthquake ever measured in Japan, and the fourth largest in the world since record-keeping began in 1900. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced, a nuclear reactor in Fukushima was compromised and released large amounts of radioactivity into the environment.

Yet there was data that warned of building below certain elevations. After all, Japan is a land of earthquakes and tsunamis. Hundreds of tsunami stones, some dating back 600 years, warn inhabitants to build on high land and not below. In the boom years following WWII, this data, this knowledge, was forgotten or ignored and the stones relegated to historical curiosities as towns, oil refinieries and nuclear reactors were built right up to the coast line. It was commercially and politically viable, and modern society thought that higher sea walls would outweigh inconvenient ancient data.

Data and remembering are more than history, more than signposts to be pointed wherever the political wind is blowing. Some of the gag orders on U.S. agencies were lifted following public outcry, not that these agencies will necessarily be spared cutbacks. But this kind of information is the result of input by countless contributors from around the world, from those who develop data gathering methods to scientists and community volunteers who collect data in the field to those who interpret it. This knowledge shouldn’t be subject to national borders, much less capricious limitations.

The environment doesn’t recognize or respect national borders, nor does climate change. Records and this kind of information are our collective global right and legacy.

Tsunami Memory Stone, Kamaishi, Iwate Prefecture. This is one of many memorials to the victims of the 2011 tsunami. Its English inscription reads: Memorial Stone of the Tsunami. Just run! Run uphill! Don't worry about the others. Save yourself first. And tell the future generations that a Tsunami once reached this point. And that those who survived were those who ran. Uphill. So run! Run uphill! Photo: Osamu Yamasaki/Digital Journal

Tsunami Memory Stone, Kamaishi, Iwate Prefecture. This is one of many memorials to the victims of the 2011 tsunami. Its English inscription reads: Memorial Stone of the Tsunami. Just run! Run uphill! Don’t worry about the others. Save yourself first. And tell the future generations that a Tsunami once reached this point. And that those who survived were those who ran. So run! Run uphill!
Photo: Osamu Yamasaki/Digital Journal

 

Rendering Unseen Stories

I was recently alerted to this lovely collection of maps on Canva – a collection that isn’t meant to provide physical directions but to provide inspiration for design. Map-making has almost always been a way of telling stories at least as much as it has been a way to find places.

 

'Berlin rangé,' a tidied-up map of Berlin. Source: Armelle Caron

‘Berlin rangé,’ a tidied-up map of Berlin’s cartographical elements.
Source: Armelle Caron

This particular collection, which could hardly be more diverse, made me think of a cartographical story in progress. Namely, that we are seeing a democratization of cartography that is practically revolutionary.

I contacted my old friend Peter Skillman, who has a deep knowledge of cartography, and we talked about maps. When you ask a master about one of his favorite topics, you might just end up following an elusive tail down a deep rabbit hole.

Peter has more to say about the evolution of cartography than I have space for here, but what we talked a lot about was the use of maps to communicate the unseen – from political borders to financial interests (especially these days, with the listing of business locations and data so important to map users and providers) to how the same map can look different depending on where you’re viewing it from (the exact location disputed territorial borders viewed from India or Pakistan, for example).

Berlin divided, 1961. Source: Berlin Wall Online

Berlin divided, 1961.
Source: Berlin Wall Online

And then there’s the fallibility of maps, whether intentional or accidental, that can disappear towns or put roads where they aren’t. Once almost purely due to political agendas, now often due to glitchy data.

What I liked, though, was our talk about metro maps. We’ve all gotten accustomed to the abstract lines of color that represent transit lines, the dots that represent stops, but consider the leap in understanding required to read a map so completely non-topographical. This “intentional distortion” is often the only representation of billions of dollars in infrastructure investment a city can offer its citizens for a system that can only be seen in small bits.

Genuine maps of unseen, or only partially seen, realities.

Berlin subway system, as visualized by Jug Cerovic, who has created standardized subway maps for cities around the world. Source: DesignBoom

Berlin subway system, as visualized by Jug Cerovic, who has created standardized subway maps for cities around the world.
Source: DesignBoom

It used to be that if you wanted to give someone a map to your home, or your favorite swimming hole, or that terrific back road BBQ rib place, you had to sketch it out and somehow get it to them. Even those sketches were a way of talking about how we thought of getting from one place to another, our individual travel perspective.

It used to be that we mostly learned to navigate our way through paper maps because we had no other choice if we wanted to get from Point A to Point B.

Berlin. Source: Vianina

Berlin.
Source: Vianina

Now we click and point and create our maps from readily available online maps, which are, in turn, often created/improved/optimized by user-generated input – much of it collected anonymously via GPS. And our maps tell us what to do, where to go, and warn us when we’ve gone astray.

No more serendipitous sauntering to points unknown. Except that with every map telling its creator’s story, you can still get lost, even if you think you know where you’re going.

 

Finding Patterns

It’s a fact in the Western world that we have, for a very long time, operated on the assumption that we humans have consciousness cornered.

Whether we adhere to a religion or no, we have mostly acted as Genesis 1:28 commands: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

All images here are the result of the Google image recognition neural network - which looks for patterns in pictures. A hallucinatory filter over a red tree.  Photograph: Google via Guardian

All images here are the result of the Google image recognition neural network – an artificial neural network (ANN) inspired by biological networks – a tool used to search for patterns in pictures. A hallucinatory filter over a red tree.
Photograph: Google via Guardian

Even before I watched documentaries of primatologist Jane Goodall’s research on chimpanzees in the 1960s, I found it hard to believe the long-held axiom of human superiority that of all creatures on the earth, only humans had emotions, social structure, intelligence, or some kind of consciousness.

That all creatures but humans operated solely on instinct.

Long-term studies are now bearing out the idea that we aren’t as special as we like to think. Descartes had it all wrong when he manage to persuade himself and countless others that animals are little more than meat machines.

I’m not talking here about cute animals stories, or reasons to become a vegetarian, or anything like that.

An ANN result of a picture of a knight after an search for animal images.

An ANN result of a picture of a knight after a search for animal images.

From the realization that many other animals use tools, to a study showing that other primates smile just like humans (and why should this come as a surprise?), to the complex social relationships of whales, to the self-restrained leadership techniques shown by alpha wolves, it’s pretty safe to say that we are not alone in the universe – and it’s not because we’ve found aliens, it’s because we’ve started seeing fellow Earth-dwellers in a different light.

They were there all along, we just didn’t know how to see them. Or we didn’t want to.

When will we get far enough in this journey of discovery to find out how they see us? What will we learn about ourselves?

A featureless image after being scanned for building images.

A featureless image after being scanned for building images.

Adding It Up

Not so very long ago, processing large amounts of data was a tedious business, riddled with human error, machine failings and limited reach.

These days, information availability can feel like a tsunami. There’s so much of it, all the time, all around. It’s become easier than ever to share information and images, sometimes involuntarily.

The sheer abundance of facts available all the time can mask what’s missing, namely, synthesis and understanding of the facts at hand.

The constant flow of information can also mask that we don’t really have all the information necessary to assess specific environments or track changes.

Old adding machine. Photo: Kevin Twomey

Old adding machine.
Photo: Kevin Twomey

The rise of citizen science projects has sought to harness both the ability to share information and the need for more facts on the ground.

A positive example of this is the Capture the Coast project getting underway in the United Kingdom. Financed by lottery funds to the tune of £1.7 million ($2.7 million), several universities and non-governmental organizations are collaborating to train 3000 volunteers to gather data on species up and down the UK coastline.

This data will be collected and analyzed by the various institutions to better track and understand climate change.

A somewhat less positive example of data sharing can be found in Wyoming, which recently passed a law that makes it illegal to gather and transmit data from open land (including photos or sample results) to the state or federal government.

The first page of Wyoming bill WY SF0012, passed in March 2015.

The first page of Wyoming bill WY SF0012, passed in March 2015.

In effect, this means that you can be arrested if you are a concerned citizen or scientist who is documenting a particular issue. And the issue at hand here is mainly the documentation of high levels of E. coli bacteria in streams due to poor ranching habits and bad herd management.

But once a law like this has been passed, it can be applied to anyone who is collecting data that could make someone else uncomfortable.

According to this Slate article, while other states have similar laws that protect the powerful agricultural industries from a concerned citizenry, Wyoming’s law is the first to actually criminalize taking a photo on public land.

Old adding machine. Photo: Kevin Twomey

Old adding machine.
Photo: Kevin Twomey

Rather than embrace collaboration that connects and supports a better understanding of the environment, these moves seem to be an attempt to turn back time, to go back to an era when information could be stashed in a filing cabinet somewhere in the basement, or simply shredded.

But these days, it’s like trying to hold back the tide. Will this kind of obstructionism slow understanding that points the way to better solutions? Probably. There might be gaps here and there, but the data will still flow.

It’s a shame that some people would rather service the gears and methods of outdated structures and habits.

It doesn’t add up now, and it never will.

Old adding machine. Photo: Kevin Twomey

Old adding machine.
Photo: Kevin Twomey

Flavor Assumptions

I walked out of the house this bright morning and found a small blossom on the rosemary bush near our entrance, the first one of spring. We moved in almost twenty years ago, and the plant was massive and gnarled, even back then.

According to the neighbors at the farm next door, the rosemary bush was planted at least twenty years earlier. I trim it, sometimes, or not, and it just carries on year after year, blooming and growing and scenting the air around our house with its clean, piney perfume.

A still life study of insects on a sprig of rosemary.  Jan van Kessel the Elder (Antwerp 1626 – 1679) Source: Alain R. Truong

A still life study of insects on a sprig of rosemary.
Jan van Kessel the Elder (Antwerp 1626 – 1679)
Source: Alain R. Truong

Rosemary as an herb is even more deeply rooted in Western Europe cuisine and culture than the old plant is against our house wall. I cook with it all the time, combining it with whatever seems right–thyme, parsley, oregano, garlic. They all seem like intuitive flavor pairings.

There’s a beautiful interactive map of flavors created a couple of years ago by Scientific American that diagrams flavor connections between various foods, from rosemary to roast beef.

In Western cuisine, the tradition is to pair foods with overlapping flavors. I was raised in the culture of Western cuisine, which is probably why pairing rosemary with thyme or basil seems natural to me.

Excerpt from The Flavor Connection.  Click here for the full interactive map of foods with connecting flavor compounds. Source: Scientific American

Excerpt from The Flavor Connection.
Click here for the full interactive map of foods with connecting flavor compounds.
Source: Scientific American

A recent study showed just how different other traditions can be. Indian cuisine, for example, tends to pair non-matching flavors and chemical compounds, rather than those that have many points of overlap.

The study, called Spices form the basis of food pairing in Indian cuisine, starts by stating that “(c)ulinary practices are influenced by climate, culture, history and geography. Molecular composition of recipes in a cuisine reveals patterns in food preferences.” The food elements that form the basis for this kind of negative flavor pairing are spices.

The study authors posit that Indian cuisine developed along both nutritional and medicinal lines, and that the availability of spices played a large role in that. Perhaps the lack of ready accessibility to spices in Western culture–until fairly recently spices remained expensive–is one reason they play a smaller role in Western food matching.

A flavor graph of Indian cuisine. Ingredients are denoted by nodes and presence of shared flavor profile between any two ingredients is depicted as a link between them. The color of node reflects ingredient category and thickness of edges is proportional to extent of flavor profile sharing.  Caption/graph: Jain, Nk, Bagler

A flavor graph of Indian cuisine. Ingredients are denoted by nodes and
presence of shared flavor profile between any two ingredients is depicted as a link between them. The color of node reflects ingredient category and thickness of edges is proportional to extent of flavor profile sharing.
Caption/graph: Jain, Nk, Bagler

At any rate, I was surprised at how many of my own assumptions about which foods and flavors intuitively go together are based on the culture in which I was raised. I love Indian cuisine, I cook it occasionally, but I can’t say the pairings come naturally to me.

If assumptions as fundamental as ‘what tastes good together’ are so determined by culture, where do other assumptions diverge unseen?

Cayenne pepper (Capsicum annuum) Source: Plantcurator

Cayenne pepper (Capsicum annuum)
Source: Plantcurator

Oxbows and Meanders

I found this tangled map, created in 1944, over on the ever-fruitful NASA web site for the Earth Observatory. It shows historical changes along a stretch of the Mississippi River.

North of the Atchafalaya River. The 1999 satellite image shows an oxbow lake from 1785, created when a meander (a bend in the river) closes itself off to leave behind a crescent.  From the Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River, published by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1944. Source: Earth Observatory

North of the Atchafalaya River. The 1999 satellite image shows an oxbow lake from 1785, created when a meander (a bend in the river) closes itself off to leave behind a crescent.
From the Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River, published by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1944.
Source: NASA/Earth Observatory

I stumbled upon it while looking at a small collection of river surveys from 1865, and comparing them to modern Google maps. There was this one, a stretch just south of St. Mary, Missouri.

Sheet 6 of the 1865 U.S. Coast Survey Map of the Mississippi River from Cairo, IL to St. Marys, MO.  Source: Wikimedia

Sheet 6 of the 1865 U.S. Coast Survey Map of the Mississippi River from Cairo, IL to St. Mary, MO.
Source: Wikimedia

The modern one looks a bit different – fewer bends, fewer islands – but not so much that it would be unrecognizable. Notably, the large bend that once branched off to St. Mary, Missouri, visible at the top of each map, is now just a small tributary.

One might have expected more of a difference over the course of 150 years of population increase and civil engineering.

The same stretch of river, with St. Mary, Missouri in the upper left corner.  Source: Googlemaps

The same stretch of river, with St. Mary, Missouri in the upper left corner.
Source: Googlemaps

But, at least on the Mississippi, the differences in major river flow come when the river is left alone to shift, meander, silt up and sidle over. The more humans work on this particular river, the more it stays the same. Levees are installed to prevent overflow (although they don’t always work).

The entire Mississippi Delta once shifted every 1,000 years or so – but with industries and port installations firmly established over the course of a few human generations, that would be an economic disaster. The Old River Control Structure, undertaken in the 1950s, keeps the delta in place.

More or less. At least, for the time being.

Because in the long run and when left to their own devices, rivers are all over the map.

Section of the 1944 Mississippi River Meander Belt. For more, visit here. Source: VisualNews

Section of the 1944 Mississippi River Meander Belt. For more, visit here.
Source: VisualNews

A Little Perspective

It’s been a rough start to 2015, so I thought I’d step back and look at a bigger picture.

NASA released an image of a section of one of our nearest neighbors, galactically-speaking: the Andromeda galaxy, also known as M31.

The image itself contains 1.5 billion pixels and represents the largest image ever released by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The section of the galaxy shown contains over 100 million stars and would take 40,000 years to traverse at the speed of light.

A section of the Andromeda galaxy.  Click here to explore the image using the NASA zoom tool.  Source: NASA

A section of the Andromeda galaxy.
Click here to explore the image using the NASA zoom tool.
Source: NASA

Something to remind me on the one hand, that we are part of something far more vast than the human squabbles that take place on the surface of our planet, and on the other hand, that among all these countless celestial bodies, this little planet is the only one we’ve got.

If you’ve got the time, set your screen to full-view and spend a few short minutes on this lovely fly-through video, put together by YouTube user daveachuck.

Subterranean Lines

A fracking well at the surface. Photo: Eugene Richards/National Geographic

A fracking well at the surface.
Photo: Eugene Richards/National Geographic

The bulk of the fracking boom currently underway in the United States is not only in one of the least populated and remote states, North Dakota (population 724,000 – and it’s only that large because of the fracking boom and all the new workers there), but it also takes place mostly underground. Sure, there are the ominous towers of gas flames and the torn up ground at the extraction points, but the real action takes place so far beneath the topsoil layer as to render it abstract.

The gap between what fracking looks like from above, and what it looks like from below, reminds me of Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s drawings in The Little Prince. What everyone initially takes to be a sketch of hat is actually a rendering of something completely different, namely, an elephant inside a snake.

From The Little Prince By: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

From The Little Prince
By: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

We humans are creatures of visual dependence. Or rather, what we can see tends to make the most conscious impression upon us, ahead of the more subtle senses of sound, taste, smell and touch.

And often, what is out of sight is truly out of mind. If we can’t see it, we have a hard time even thinking about it.

Well locations around New Town, N.D. Source: Fractracker

Well locations around New Town, N.D.
Source: Fractracker

These various maps and renderings of fracking in North Dakota attempt to make the underground activity more tangible, to show us the elephant inside the hat.

Underground fracking lines, drawn from the well, with horizontal underground lines marking the extent of each well. New Town, North Dakota, from Mapping a Fracking Boom in North Dakota. Source: Mason Inman/Wired

Underground fracking lines, drawn from the well, with horizontal underground lines marking the extent of each well. New Town, North Dakota, from Mapping a Fracking Boom in North Dakota.
Source: Mason Inman/Wired

According to Mason Inman over at Map Labs, who created the map above, “Each well travels down about two miles, then turns horizontally and snakes through the rock formation for another two miles. There were 8,406 of these Bakken wells, as of North Dakota’s latest count. If you lined them all up—including their vertical and horizontal parts—they’d loop all the way around the Earth.”

The New York Times took the added step of inverting the wells as if they were above ground, the long vertical drills standing like slender trunks one or two miles high, with only one or two branches of equal length suspended in the air, a high forest of activity.

The area around New Town, North Dakota, from What North Dakota Would Look Like if Its Oil Drilling Lines Were Aboveground Source: Gregor Aisch/NYT

The area around New Town, North Dakota, from What North Dakota Would Look Like if Its Oil Drilling Lines Were Aboveground
Source: Gregor Aisch/NYT