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Posted by: Meagan Snow
Explore the fertile history of America's soil survey maps, which evolved alongside soil science over the course of the 20th century.
Posted in: 20th century cartography, American History, Physical Geography
Posted by: Amelia Raines
This post explores a unique geologic map. Ives's strata map, made up of 10 plates representing different geologic periods, was designed as a tool for instruction in schools and colleges in the late 19th century.
Posted in: 19th century cartography, American History, Physical Geography
Posted by: Meagan Snow
This blog post describes William "Buffalo Bill" Cody's attempt to irrigate Wyoming's Big Horn Basin through maps which detail the area.
Posted in: 19th century cartography, 20th century cartography, American History, Physical Geography
Posted by: Julie Stoner
A blog exploring the hottest place on earth, Death Valley California.
Posted in: 20th century cartography, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth
Posted by: Amelia Raines
The dramatic eruption of Krakatoa (or Krakatau in Indonesian) in 1883 was, as our sister blog Headlines and Heroes describes it, “one of the first global catastrophes.” By its very destruction, this small Indonesian island was thrust onto the world stage, its name becoming almost shorthand for volcanic disaster. Geologist Rogier Verbeek, who had briefly …
Posted in: 19th century cartography, Asian History, Oceania, Physical Geography
Posted by: Amelia Raines
Growing up in Michigan, I was a lake enthusiast from a young age, and extremely proud that my home state was surrounded by North America’s most important inland bodies of water. These are, of course, the Great Lakes, so called because of their size – according to the 2020 National Geographic Atlas of the World, …
Posted in: 19th century cartography, 20th century cartography, African History, American History, Physical Geography
Posted by: Julie Stoner
If you were asked the location of the furthest point from the center of the Earth, you would likely be inclined to state the summit of Mount Everest as an obvious choice. Looking at the 1862 pictorial map below would seem to confirm that it would be in the Himalayan Mountains of Asia. Fascinatingly, due …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth
Posted by: Julie Stoner
Spewing lava and gas from deep within the earth, volcanoes are one of nature’s most explosive natural features. Thousands of volcanoes dot the planet but only about 1,500 are considered active, meaning they have erupted at some point in the last 10,000 years. The largest of these active volcanoes in both mass and volume is …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth
Posted by: Julie Stoner
In Part 1 of this post, we discussed the Amazon River in South America as a contender for the title of the longest river on Earth. While arguments have been made by some cartographers that the Amazon should be given this distinction, it is traditionally held by most that the longest river in the world …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth