Monday, October 29, 2012

Geographicus Antique Map Archive



The Geographicus Antique Map Archive is the scholarly arm of Geographicus Antique Maps, an online retail gallery of fine antique maps from the sixteenth through the early twentieth century. As dealers, we lavish attention on each map that crosses our desk, researching its history, context and quirks. In the Geographicus Archive, much of this research is made available for public study and use. You can link to our maps and embed our Zoomable maps and map images into your own website at no charge. High resolution images of each map on this site, suitable for printing, are also available for a minimal licensing fee.

The Geographicus Archive attempts to bridge the gap between a webstore and an academic archive. The maps presented here include our current stock and much of our previously sold inventory. Please note, however, that maps on this site are not available for sale; similar maps may be available at our retail site, www.geographicus.com.

- Kevin Brown, Proprietor

Sunday, October 28, 2012

OldMapsOnline Portal




Interested in maps? Visit the search interface.

The OldMapsOnline Portal is an easy-to-use gateway to historical maps in libraries around the world.

It allows the user to search for online digital historical maps across numerous different collections via a geographical search. Search by typing a place-name or by clicking in the map window, and narrow by date. The search results provide a direct link to the map image on the website of the host institution.

OldMapsOnline has been created by a collaboration between The Great Britain Historical GIS Project based at The University of Portsmouth, UK and Klokan Technologies GmbH, Switzerland

Its creation was funded by the Joint Information Service Committee under Strand C: Clustering Digital Content of their Content Programme 2011-13. It is the successor of a project lead by the Moravian Library in the Czech Republic between 2008 and 2011. The portal is based on the MapRank Search technology originally developed for the Kartenportal project in Switzerland.  

All copyright and IPR rights relating to the map images and metadata records are retained by the host institution which provided them and any query regarding them must be addressed to that particular host institution. Host institutions provide their own Terms of Use. Along with the links provided in the individual search results a general link to the maps section of the website of each host institution is also provided on our Collections page following each Collection description.

OldMapsOnline provides Terms of Use and Help guidelines, but not an enquiry service.
For all queries relating to the metadata or maps including purchasing copies please contact the host institution concerned.
 
For any queries relating to the search technology behind the interface please contact Klokan Technologies GmbH.

For the period until 31st January 2013 queries relating to becoming involved in the project as either a user tester or a content provider should be directed to the project team: info@oldmapsonline.org

Saturday, October 27, 2012

Chinese map may rewrite world history



A Chinese map collector has found a copy of an ancient map he claims proves controversial theories that a famed Chinese mariner was the first to sail to the Americas and circumnavigate the world.
Liu Gang says the map supports recent theories that Chinese people sailed to America before Christopher Columbus and charted parts of the world such as Antartica and northern Canada long before Western explorers.

"The map shows us that Chinese discovered the world 70 years before Columbus," Liu said in a public unveiling of the chart. "The map tells us that [mariner] Zheng He discovered the world."
The map is dated to 1763 but is also clearly marked that it is a copy of a map made in 1418. That date coincides with Zheng He's voyages, from 1405 to 1432.

Liu bought the map for about US$500 (A$666) from a map collector in Shanghai in 2001, but only realised its importance after he read Gavin Menzies' best-selling book 1421: The Year China Discovered The World.

In the book Menzies theorises that previously undiscovered world maps drawn up by Zheng He's admirals were copied by European map makers and were extensively used during the voyages of great Western explorers, including Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Vasco Da Gama and James Cook.
Much of Menzies' theories are supported by his knowledge of ocean currents, continental trade winds and star navigation that he learned during his life as a British naval commander.

Despite its prominence on best-seller lists, many historians have criticised Menzies' theories for the lack of accompanying evidence.

China's Ming Dynasty banned ocean-going exploration and trade on pain of death after Zheng He's final voyage, largely due to the death of Emperor Zhu Di, who sponsored the voyages.

The huge costs of Zheng's fleets, which often numbered hundreds of ships, were another factor.
The Chinese records of Zheng He's voyages have largely been lost, either purposely destroyed as part of the ban on ocean-going navigation or due to a fire that ravaged Beijing's imperial palace in the 1420s.



Liu believes a lot of the records still exist, but Chinese scholars have largely ignored them.
"I sincerely believe that other maps exist and books exist [that contain evidence of Zheng He's world travels] but no-one has been paying attention to them," Liu says. "It is my purpose to try to wake these [scholars] up."

Friday, October 26, 2012

Life after Darwin



Recent genetic discoveries demonstrate that Darwin's 'tree of life' theory of evolution is wrong and it's time to move on, argues Didier Raoult.

Many Greek philosophers perceived the world to be in perpetual motion — a process of constant evolution. In Charles Darwin's world, however, creationism set the rules for science. So, underpinning his theory of evolution is the literal interpretation of the Bible that dominated his era, combined with Aristotle's vision of nature as definitively fixed.

Darwin, together with J. B. Lamarck, promoted a vision of a changing world, while upholding the idea that organisms evolved from a single root — a position held by Adam and Eve in the creationist worldview, and taken over in the modern era by the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA). And from that remnant of the Biblical story of creation sprung the notion of a tree of life, alongside major concepts such as gradualism (the view that speciation does not occur abruptly) and the idea that minor selection pressures can, over time, have a profound effect on improved fitness.

Darwin's vision of the world deeply influenced biology in the 20th century, despite persistent questions posed by factors such as lateral gene transfer, neutral evolution, and chaotic bottlenecks in natural selection. But recent genetic research unequivocally refutes this worldview.

Chimeras

Life is primarily the expression of the information contained in genes. All living organisms appear as mosaics of genetic tissue, or chimeras, suggesting that no two genes have the same evolutionary history. This framework is incompatible with the 'tree of life' representation. Rather, it resembles a rhizome — an underground stem that sends out roots and shoots that develop into new plants.
Indeed, we now know that the proportion of genetic sequences on Earth that belongs to visible organisms is negligible. Furthermore, only 15 per cent of the genetic sequences found in the samples from the environment and from faeces analysed in metagenomic studies belong to the three domains of microbes currently recognised in the tree-of-life framework — bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes. Viruses contain another 15 to 30 per cent of these genetic sequences.

The unidentified genetic sequences pose a problem, because it is not known whether vehicles other than viruses, bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes exist. Conversely, we know that new genes, designated ORFans ('orphan genes'), are commonly created by gene duplication, fusion, or other unknown mechanisms. Yet, according to Darwin's tree of life concept, this phenomenon would be impossible.
Human cells comprise genes of eukaryotic, bacterial, archaean, and viral origin. As this chimerism increases, it occasionally integrates genes from microbes that live within the human body — as happens when a human is infected by herpesvirus 6. Once integrated in a person's genome, these genes can be transmitted from parent to child — making microbial genes their 'grandfathers'.
This transfer of genetic sequences from parasites to hosts could involve hundreds of genes for a bacterium in different hosts. For example, if the bacterium Wolbachia's genes are integrated by different hosts, such as spiders, insects, or worms, the hosts' offspring are also descendants of Wolbachia.

Moreover, certain viruses' size and genetic repertoire is comparable with that of bacteria, archaea, or small eukaryotes. Indeed, the life of giant viruses is as complex as that of like-sized microorganisms.

Dogma

But the current classification of the domains of life is based on the ribosome — the production apparatus of proteins — which does not exist in these viruses. Without ribosomes, traditionalists say, viruses cannot be considered biological entities comparable to other microbes. But that is pure dogma; these viruses are akin to the other microbes.

Darwin's theory is further used to support the belief that ancient humans — Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, and Denisova — did not mix. In fact, based on Darwin's assumptions, most anthropologists claim that modern humans were simply descended from Cro-Magnons, who had exterminated their less-fit adversaries. Given this supposition, a single name (Homo sapiens) is used for both modern humans and the preferred ancestor, Cro-Magnon. But we now know that modern humans are chimeras of these three ancient humans.

This understanding also refutes the legend of 'Mitochondrial Eve', the woman from whom all humans supposedly descend on their mother's side.

Research on the human leukocyte antigen genes, which are involved in the human immune response, shows that such a common ancestor could not have existed; this group of genes derives from those of all three known ancient humans.

Genetic research, in particular, must be free to find new models to explain, and enhance, 21st century scientific discovery. Today, Darwin's theory of evolution is more a hindrance than a help, because it has become a quasi-theological creed that is preventing the benefits of improved research from being fully realised.

About the author:Didier Raoult is director of the Research Unit in Infectious and Tropical Emergent Diseases, collaborating with CNRS (National Center for the Scientific Research), IRD (Research for the Development Institute), and the University of the Méditerranée in Marseille.

Satellite finds ozone hole still shrinking



The Antarctic ozone hole reached its largest size for the season on 22 September (Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center)

Reuters

The seasonal hole in the ozone layer above the Antarctic this year was the second smallest in two decades, but still covered an area three times the size of Australia, say US experts.

The average size of the Earth's protective shield was 17.9 million square kilometres, according to satellite measurements by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.

"It happened to be a bit warmer this year high in the atmosphere above Antarctica, and that meant we didn't see quite as much ozone depletion as we saw last year, when it was colder," says Jim Butler of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory.

The Antarctic ozone hole, which forms in September and October, reached its largest size for the season - 21 million square kilometres - on 22 September.

In comparison, the largest ozone hole recorded to date was one of 29.8 million square kilometres in the year 2000.

The ozone layer - which helps protect the Earth from potentially dangerous ultraviolet rays that can cause skin cancer and cataracts - began developing holes on an annual basis starting in the 1980s due to chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs.

CFCs, once commonly used in refrigerators and aerosol cans, now are almost non-existent thanks to an international treaty signed on 16 September 1987, amid global concern over widening holes in the ozone layer.

Still, it could take another decade before scientists detect early signs that the ozone over the Antarctic is returning, says NOAA.

The ozone layer above Antarctica likely will not return to its early 1980s state until about 2060, according to NASA scientist Paul Newman.

#

I have just been reading the article 'Chemical equator' keeps southern air clean and it got me thinking… If the atmosphere in the northern hemisphere is much more polluted than it is in the southern hemisphere why is there an ozone hole in the south and not in the north?
—Damon

The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain' according to the classic song — but pollution doesn't.
Car exhaust fumes and ozone-depleting chemicals produced in Madrid, New York and Tokyo rise into the atmosphere, where they are swept away towards the equator and the less polluted southern hemisphere.

Luckily, most of this northern hemisphere pollution is quarantined by what scientists refer to as the chemical equator — a natural meteorological boundary in the tropics.

"At the equator, there is a lot of upward moving air and precipitation, which washes out chemicals before they can get from the northern hemisphere to the southern hemisphere," says CSIRO climatologist Dr Paul Fraser.

However, the reason we have a southern ozone hole instead of a northern one is not due to the amount of atmospheric pollution — it's due to temperature.

The stratosphere in the southern hemisphere — the layer of atmosphere where the ozone layer lies, 15 to 50 kilometres above the Earth's surface — is about five degrees Celsius colder than in the northern hemisphere.

"We get more ice in the stratosphere in the southern hemisphere, making the ozone-depleting chemicals more potent," Fraser says.

"This leads to that disparity between hemispheres as far as ozone [depletion] is concerned since it's not the level of chemicals that is driving them, but the ability of those chemicals to deplete ozone."
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are one type of ozone-depleting chemicals. They react with ultraviolet light to produce chlorine, which is then able to destroy ozone.

This chemical reaction that frees chlorine from CFCs takes place on the surface of tiny particles of ice in the stratosphere.

"The more ice there is in the stratosphere, the more ozone-destroying chlorine is liberated from CFCs," Fraser says.

A seasonal event

The ozone hole — which is not actually a 'hole' but a region of depleted ozone in the stratosphere over Antarctica — is a seasonal event.

Every winter, a vortex of cold air swirls around the South Pole, forming polar stratospheric clouds.
The chemical reactions that deplete ozone take place on in these icy clouds and the 'ozone hole' begins to appear.

By late spring, when temperatures begin to rise, the ice evaporates and the ozone layer starts to recover.

The hole over Antarctica is much more pronounced than over the Arctic because the lower temperatures mean the stratospheric clouds form for longer periods.
Dr Paul Fraser was interviewed by Carmelo Amalfi.
 

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Sun dogs



Sun dogs formed by high level ice crystal clouds.

Sun dogs are also called mock suns or perihelia, Greek for ``beside the Sun.'' They consist of one or two patches of light that appear on either or both sides of the Sun. Sun dogs make it appear that there are two or three suns in the sky. When two sun dogs occur, one may be brighter than the other, or higher than the other. They may appear white or colored. Sun dogs often appear just outside the circumference of a 22° halo.

Occasionally these patches of light are seen around a very bright, full moon. In that case, they are called moon dogs.

Sun dogs are produced by the refraction of sunlight that shines through plate-like ice crystals with diameters around 50 micrometers (.0019 inch) or larger. Aerodynamic drag causes the plate-like ice crystals to fall slowly through the air much like leaves falling from a tree. When the ice crystals are positioned horizontally, with large, flat ends parallel to the ground, they will refract sunlight at an angle of 22° and produce the sun dogs. When the ice crystals are randomly oriented, a 22° halo is produced. It takes millions of falling ice crystals, all oriented so that they refract sunlight at 22°, to produce sun dogs.

Where these falling ice crystals are relatively large and plentiful, the sun dogs will be colorful. This color is produced by the selective refraction of light, also called dispersion. In the process of dispersion, each ice crystal acts like a tiny prism, separating sunlight into the spectrum of colors.

The amount by which each color is refracted by an ice crystal varies slightly. Red light has the longest wavelength and is slowed the least as it passes through the ice crystal. Hence, red is bent the least. On the other extreme, violet light has the shortest wavelength and is slowed the most as it passes through the ice crystal. Hence, violet is bent the most.

The result is that red light appears on the edge of the sun dog closest to the Sun and blue appears on the edge farthest from the Sun. The reason why blue, and not violet, appears is that the human eye is better able to perceive blue than violet.

Occasionally a halo will also be colorful, rather than its characteristic white. This dispersion of sunlight into bands of color, by the process just described, occurs when the ice crystals are relatively large and of uniform size and shape.

Superior mirages




Superior mirage of a distant mountain.

Superior mirages are created under conditions that are opposite of those that create inferior mirages. They form in cold weather when the surface air is colder, and thus denser, than the air above. In a superior mirage, a distant object appears to be taller and closer to the observer than it really is. Sometimes it appears upside down. Superior mirages are most common in polar regions, where the air over a snow-covered surface is colder than the air several feet (about a meter) above.

For example, a mountain in the distance might appear taller and nearer than it actually is. The light from the mountaintop is reflected in all directions. Some of that light follows a gently sloping path downward. When that light enters the layer of colder air, it is bent toward the perpendicular; in this case, into a steeper downward path. When this refracted light reaches your eye, your eye follows the path of the light, at its refracted angle, back over the distance to the mountain. The image thus appears higher above the ground than it normally would.


Fata Morgana is most common in polar regions, especially over large sheets of ice with a uniform low temperature, but it can be observed almost anywhere. While in polar regions Fata Morgana is observed on cold days, in deserts and over oceans and lakes Fata Morgana is observed on hot days. In this form of mirage, images which would normally be concealed behind the horizon appear distorted in the sky. A fata morgana is caused by abrupt variances in air temperature; when air above the line of sight is warmer than the air below. This is known as temperature inversion, since it does not represent the normal temperature gradient of the atmosphere. Light traveling from the horizon is refracted towards the earth, away from the warmer air above. These are the conditions which cause a superior mirage - a Fata Morgana occurs only when light travels through multiple distinct temperature gradients. This results in an image which may be compressed in some sections and expanded in others. As air temperature changes over time so do the various angles of refraction, causing the image to expand or contract as the atmosphere returns to its standard temperature gradient.

The name ``Fata Morgana'' is Italian for ``fairy Morgan.'' According to mythology, Morgan, or Morgan le Fay, was the fairy half-sister of King Arthur. She lived in an underwater crystal palace and was capable of creating magical castles out of thin air. In the fifteenth century, Italian poets from the town of Reggio viewed a fantastic, castle-like mirage near the Strait of Messina (the waterway between Italy and Sicily). Unable to explain what they saw, they called it a ``Fata Morgana,'' and the name stuck.

A special type of superior mirage is called a Fata Morgana. A Fata Morgana takes the form of spectacular castles, buildings, or cliffs rising above cold land or water, particularly in polar regions. This type of mirage is produced by light that is refracted as it passes through air layers of various temperatures. A Fata Morgana requires that the air temperature over a cold surface increase with height. Specifically, the temperature rises slowly throughout the surface layer of air, then several feet above the surface the air temperature rises more quickly. In the next layer of air, the temperature rises slowly again.