Thu, 29 Nov 2007
There's a hole in my geography
There was an earthquake today in Martinique. I fired up a kml file in Google Earth and the thing flew to an island off the coast of South America! Grenada is down there, too, along with Trinidad & Tobago, etc. All my life I thought those little islands were some vague where between Florida and Puerto Rico, kinda like the Bahamas.
View Larger Map
By the way, check out the new "Terrain" button in Google Maps.
posted by Bill White at 18:22 | permalink | email me | | |
Sun, 07 Oct 2007
Mannahatta Island, 1609
Found in the the New Yorker, a project dedicated to reconstructing the pre-European ecology of Manhattan Island (there are a few very cool reconstructed pastoral scenes at the website):
The aim of the Mannahatta Project is to reconstruct the ecology of Manhattan when Henry Hudson first sailed by in 1609 and compare it to what we know of the island today. The Mannahatta Project will help us to understand, down to the level of one city block, where in Manhattan streams once flowed or where American Chestnuts may have grown, where black bears once marked territories, and where the Lenape fished and hunted. Most history books dispense of the pre-European history of New York in only a few pages. However, with new methods in geographic analysis and the help of a remarkable 18th-century map, we will discover a new aspect of New York culture, the environmental foundation of the city.
posted by Bill White at 11:12 | permalink | email me | | |
