The Awesomest Map on (and of) Earth

What would the planet look like if you didn't care about political borders attention to country borders, trees, soil, or even water? Why, it would look just like the image at your left -- a geological map of the world.

Generally speaking, geologists are obsessed with maps. From the cheap gas station variety to 1:24,000 scale "quad" maps that most rock jocks use to find their way in the field, they can't get enough.

But our fascination with maps goes beyond geo-geekery. Maps provide a unique way of looking at the world; a new perspective on the state, region, country, and planet we live in. Witness the popularity of a site like Worldmapper, which lets you distort countries' sizes based on their GDP, population size, or oil consumption rates. Or Google maps, whose Street View function lets you peer into strangers' bedroom windows in several cities around the world.

The have been gobs of technologies operating out of the public eye for a long time that have led to these explosion of popular widgets. Constellations of GPS satellites have been letting us (or at least our military) know exactly where we are on the globe for decades, while geographers have used GIS (that's Geographical Information Systems) for everything from mapping the effects of climate change on glaciers to charting urban sprawl and air pollution to finding unexploded bombs in the Iraqi desert -- during the *first* Gulf War.

So a new tech called OneGeology could be seen as just the latest addition to the heap of mapping awesomeness. But it's more than that, it's any geologists' wet dream: a comprehensive geological map of the world (pictured). Equal parts GIS, Google Earth, and bedrock map, OneGeology promises to provide a whole new venue for geologists to maniuplate mapping data. It should lead to lots of amazing new science, but at the very least, as this video on YouTube shows, it'll give us a pretty stunning new way of looking at our humble planet.

Comments

[Larry O'Hanlon]

You are right about geologists being map freaks. When I was a kid my grandmother used to bring me AAA maps and I was delighted. It's a weird obsession, but seems to come with the territory, if you'll pardon the pun.

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