Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1
The
Incroyable Pique-nique
and the
Méridienne Verte
Places can be admired for what they
are
but they can also be admired for what they
mean
. The White Cliffs of Dover on the north shore of the English Channel between
Britain and France are a beautiful seascape, the white, massive, motionless, white
chalk cliffs contrasting with the active gray-blue sea. The Cliffs are also a symbol
of the island independence of Britain, the bulwark shore that historically kept out
potential invaders. For Britons returning via ferries and liners from overseas, the
White Cliffs may be the first sight of home after a long absence, providing a warm
welcome home. Americans may react similarly to the New York skyline and the
Statue of Liberty, South Africans to Table Mountain, and Australians to the Sydney
Harbor and its Bridge.
It is not often that people react to an abstraction of a place. The Paris Meridian
is the north-south line running through Paris. It is entirely theoretical and there is
no one landscape of beauty to react to. Rather, it cuts through a collection of typical
French landscapes, the good and the bad proportionately represented. The Paris
Meridian runs through the French capital and a sample of its neighborhoods.
It breaks out of the capital through the suburbs, some charming, some depressed.
It runs north through both rural and industrial France to Dunkerque and the sandy
dunes of the northern French coast. It runs south alongside the major autoroute, La
Méridienne, and through the mountains of the Massif Central, the central block of
elevated land in the middle of France. It then drops through the vineyards on the
slopes of southern France. Beyond Perpignan, the southernmost city in France, it
rises to the mountains of the Pyrenees and continues into Spain, past Barcelona and
into the Balearic Islands.
Perhaps even some French people do not know exactly what the Paris Meridian
is. However, they are proud of the magnificent achievements of the astronomers and
geodesists who created it, and who, using it as a base, meticulously mapped France
and measured the world. This pride in the theoretical was used in the argument two
hundred years ago that the distance along the Paris Meridian from the North Pole
to the Equator should be used as the fundamental international standard of length
- the meter.
Standardization helps unite a political region. For example, In 221 BCE in the
Eastern Zhou region of Asia the Emperor Qin (or Chi-in) unified seven of the warring
states, subjugating rival states through ruthless centralization and imposing standard
