Map of Japanese Earthquakes leading up to and after the large Fukushima event

The Nazca lines, US style.

"In the desert 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles is a suburb abandoned in advance of itself—the unfinished extension of a place called California City. Visible from above now are a series of badly paved streets carved into the dust and gravel, like some peculiarly American response to the Nazca Lines."

Link.

Satirical Map of Europe

click to enlarge

Lifted from BibliOdyssey:

"Louis Raemaekers (1869-1956) was one of the most famous cartoonist/caricaturists of WWI. He crossed the border from Holland into Belgium to witness first-hand the atrocities of the advancing German army. He subsequently chronicled the brutality of theses forces in his cartoons which drew the wrath of the Germans. They forced the Dutch authorities to put the illustrator on trial for jeopardising the neutrality of the Netherlands (acquitted). A reward was offered by the Germans for Raemaekers' arrest and he escaped to Britain where he continued to skewer the German army in his drawings. He produced a thousand cartoons during the war and gained world wide acclaim from their syndication."

See more incredible maps at BibliOdyssey.

A Charicature map of WWI

Snippet from BibliOdyssey:

"There is a lot to see in the map, not only because it depicts the start of World War I from a satirical standpoint, but because the views being expressed are coming out of Japan/Asia."

Click on the picture to see large, or here to see super-large.

Tsunami travel time maps

very pretty

via moon river

Map Reading

"Maps are never value-free images; except in the narrowest Euclidean sense they are not in themselves either true or false. Both in the selectivity of their content and in their signs and styles of representation, maps are a way of conceiving, articulating and structuring the human world which is biased towards, promoted by, and exerts influence upon sets of social relations. By accepting such premises it becomes easier to see how appropriate they are to manipulation by the powerful in society."

- Harley. J. B. "Maps, Knowledge, and Power".



"Eurocentrism, like Renaissance perspectives in painting, envisions the world from a single privileged point. . . . Eurocentrism bifurcates the world into the "West and the Rest" and organizes everyday language into binaristic heirarchies implicitly flattering to Europe: our 'nations,' their 'tribes'; our 'religions,' their 'superstitions'; our 'culture,' their 'folklore'; our 'art,' their 'artifacts'; our 'demonstrations,' their 'riots'; our 'defense,' their 'terrorism.' "

- Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. "Unthinking Eurocentrism".



"Maps made it easy for European states to carve up Africa and other heathen lands, to lay claim to land and rsources, and to ignore existing social and political structure. Knowledge is power and crude explorers' maps made possible treaties between nations with conflicting claims. That maps drawn up by diplomats and generals became a political reality lends an unintended irony to the aphorism that the pen is mightier than the sword."

- Monmonier, Mark. "How to Lie with Maps".

via moonriver
second map found here.

Drone Corp

Just when I was getting into a bit of a rut, not finding anything new and exciting, I stumble into Drone Corp's collection of visual artifacts.

Now I want my four hours back.

Earthquake maps and graphs

This is a map of the Apparent Intensity of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake using the Rossi-Forel scale.

These seismic readings from around the world taken in 1906 are from the same San Francisco earthquake as above. It's interesting to see which world locations were able to register the event.

This, by the way, is the state San Francisco was left in after said quake. (Youtube).

Text and images via BibliOdyssey.
Images originally from the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection Website.
previously: earthquake rose