Changing face of the Earth

Until recently, the biggest challenge facing those faced with the responsibility of updating world atlases was to check on changing political boundaries that were subject to change as a result of wars and skirmishes. Today, as the following article illustrates, a more daunting challenge is to track the changes in entire landscapes due to the impacts of industrialization, agribusiness and climate change.

Humanity's impact on the planet has never been greater, more widespread or more rapid. (GW)

The Art of Mapping on the Run

By Andrew C. Revkin
New York Times
September 9, 2007

It used to be that updated editions of world atlases mainly tracked the shifting of borders and changes in the names of cities and countries determined by politics, diplomacy or war.

The surface of the planet itself was a relatively constant template in the background. You could render it in more detail with, say, better satellite data, but the basics didn’t change much.

Now, though, the accelerating and intensifying impact of human activities is visibly altering the planet, requiring ever more frequent redrawing not only of political boundaries, but of the shape of Earth’s features themselves.

How so?

In the new edition of “The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World” (Times Books, London, 2007), for instance, there are before-and-after views of the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth-largest lake. It shriveled as Soviet-era irrigation projects siphoned off the rivers that replenished it. A dam completed in 2005 now prevents water from flowing out of the lake’s northern lobe, which is expanding as a result.

The lake’s vanishing and rebirth, easily visible from space, are the work of people.

“The impactful thing is the size of some of these changing features,” Mick Ashworth, the editor in chief of the atlas, said in a telephone interview from England.

The atlas charts the shifting coastline of Bangladesh, for example, where land has been lost to rising sea levels. It identifies islands that are likely to be subsumed by the seas, Tuvalu, Vanuatu and the Marshall Islands among them, and coastal communities that may be forced to move. One of them is Shishmaref, Alaska, located on a narrow island along the Bering Strait, where the break-up of sea ice has left the village more exposed to storms and the sea is advancing at a rate of 10 feet a year.

Some scientists focused on global environmental change say it is no surprise that atlases, in essence, are becoming autobiographical, reflecting the reality that the physical Earth is increasingly what the human species makes of it.

The pace of change will only accelerate over the next two generations, many earth scientists and demographers say, as the human population and its “footprint” — through growing appetites for energy, water and food — crest before leveling off later in the century as communities age and technology advances.

William Clark, an expert at Harvard on global environmental trends, said it was significant that, “even the most conservative of print atlases increasingly go beyond a little map that treats ‘world climates’ or ‘world vegetation’ the way it treats mountain ranges” — as permanent fixtures.

All of this means a lot more work for atlas makers, who now have to keep up not only with political change, but also with large-scale effects of people on the home planet.

Mr. Ashworth said databases tracked by a staff of 50 cartographers are updated every three and a half minutes.

“We can literally see environmental disasters unfolding before our eyes,” he said in a news release last week