The history of cartography is littered with such pseudo-continents, chimerical islands, dream-rivers and other Wilkean visions, flickering between the literal and the mythical. cartographers have often tended also to be dreamers, seduced into their science by the beauty of maps and the flights of imagination that they prompt.
~ Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind
Imagine now the flight of the imagination that took place when geologist and cartographer Marie Tharp connected the pattern of canyons, ridges, and mountains she was mapping, along with the pattern of earthquakes in those regions, to the burgeoning theory of plate tectonics and seafloor spreading. A single map can change the world.
“Not too many people can say this about their lives: The whole world was spread out before me (or at least, the seventy percent of it covered by oceans). I had a blank canvas to fill with extraordinary possibilities, a fascinating jigsaw puzzle to piece together: mapping the world’s vast hidden seafloor. It was a once-in-a-lifetime—a once-in-the-history-of-the-world—opportunity for anyone, but especially for a woman in the 1940s. The nature of the times, the state of the science, and events large and small, logical and illogical, combined to make it all happen.”
Check out our paper on the vast expanses discovered and charted by our Cosmicflows research program, published recently in the Cosmo of ’69 Cosmology Blog. Many thanks to Jenny Wagner and her team for their invitation to write in this new venue.
I started to block out a new continent tonight, no plans to use it any time soon. The landmasses started out as English parish and district council boundaries taken from OpenStreetMap.
An #Introduction: I am a galactic cartographer specializing in visualizing astronomical data sets derived from the European Space Agency's Gaia astrometry satellite. You can find a set of posters I created with the help of Gaia mission astronomers here: https://gruze.org/posters_dr3
I am working on a virtual starship to travel around the Milky Way. Follow or boost me if you are interested in the Milky Way and scientific visualization using VR. #Astronomy#VR#Cartography#WebXR
a map of the galaxy density field spanning over 700 million light years. Note how insignificant is our Local Group, that is, our home group of galaxies, in the grand scheme of things!
In my spare time I like to browse the vast #NASA image archives to create #3D models and #animations like this one.
Back on #birdapp I really enjoyed connecting with engineers and scientists from around the world. I hope we can build an even better community over here!