Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The Earth, overlaid with its antipodal version. Very few spots are sandwich-friendly in
both hemispheres.
It's easy to dismiss
the Earth sandwich
as a silly (if ambitious) prank, the kind of con-
ceptualartthattheLiverpoolcultbandEcho&theBunnymenpracticedinthe1980s,when
theywouldincludeoddlocalesliketheOuterHebridesofScotlandontheirtouritineraries,
onthemapfreaksI'vemetonmyjourney,oneofthethingstheyallshareisthissameurge:
tomaketheEarth—theentireEarth,itsmeridiansandparallelsandantipodes—intoagiant
plaything.SystematictravelersusejetplanesandgeocachersuseGPSsatellitesandGoogle
Earth fans use 3D-rendered aerial photography, but the impulse is the same one that's led
people to pore over atlases for centuries: the need to place our little lives in the context of
the Earth as a whole, to visualize them in the context of a grander scale. To this day, when
weoutlinesomeambitiousplan,westillspeakofhowitwillputus“onthemap.”Wecrave
that wider glory and perspective.
We also crave exploration, and that's a thrill that's become scarcer as technology has ad-
vanced. When Alexander the Great saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were
no more worlds to conquer. Well, actually, I don't know if he did or not. That's a quote
from Alan Rickman's German terrorist character in
Die Hard
. But the sentiment, at least,
is true enough: human ambition requires new frontiers to cross, and for the last millenni-
um, most of those frontiers were geographic in nature. In 1872, a surveyor named Almon
Thompson explored the high desert plateaus of south-central Utah, mapping a tributary of
the Colorado called Potato Creek, which he renamed the Escalante River, and a thirty-mile
mountainrangenowcalledtheHenryMountains.Thompsondidn'tknowit,buthisdiscov-
