FRONTIER - Maphead - page 155

bottom pixels. And sometimes there are things there at the bottom that were never known
before.”
In 1868, the element helium was discovered, revolutionizing children's birthday parties
forever. Though Earth has large reserves of helium underground—some U.S. natural gas
deposits are as much as 7 percent helium—the scientists who first discovered evidence of
helium found it not under their feet but through spectroscopic analysis from one hundred
million miles away. Helium was discovered on the Sun fifteen years before we found it
here on Earth. * In much the same way, scientists and amateurs alike are nowadays discov-
ering Earth's hidden secrets on Google Earth before they turn up on our real home plan-
et. Meteor-impact craters in Western Australia, a Roman villa in Parma , the ruins of a
lost Amazonian city that may have inspired the legends of El Dorado, a remote forest in
Mozambique where hundreds of new species of plants and animals live—all these things
were never on any map until they were spotted from space by Google Earth surfers. † In
2008,ateamofGermanscientistsstudiedGoogleimagesofmorethan eightthousandgraz-
ing cattle and three thousand wild deer in pastures all over the world. The vast majority,
they were surprised to see, graze standing north to south, aligned to the Earth's poles. It
was the first evidence that large mammals can sense and use the Earth's magnetic fields
the way that migrating birds and turtles do, and it had been right under our noses all the
time. People have watched livestock graze for millennia, but before Google Earth, nobody
had ever noticed that they were all facing the same way. “I think you'll end up with both
scientific and amateur studies solving problems that were intractable ten years ago,” says
McClendon. “I wouldn't be surprised if we discover more in the next twenty years than we
ever did.”
ButtheGoogleEarthteambelievesitssoftwarehaschangedmapsinamorefundament-
al way than just adding detail. Because its globe looks like a real place, it blurs the distinc-
tion between map and territory in a way that would make Borges or Eco dizzy. When you
see something on Google Earth, says McClendon, “You don't debate it. You don't say, 'Is
this somebody's representation? Did they draw this picture?' It's not somebody's version
of reality. It is reality.”
Map deconstructionists would have a field day with that claim! The trend in geography
over the last thirty years has been to consider maps not as reality but as fallible narratives,
each with its own quirks and agendas. This is a healthy kind of skepticism; maps work so
well, generally, in getting us where we're going that we don't think to question the thou-
sands of assumptions and biases that undergird them. Even a seemingly unimpeachable
world map on a classroom wall isn't immune. Why should the top of the map be north,
rather than south? Why is America arbitrarily at the center? Why is it easier to see political
features than physical ones? Why include this city but not that one? Why label Taiwan as a
country but not Palestine, or vice versa?