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Edwin Danson is a Chartered Surveyor and a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors.  His new book, Weighing the World: The Quest To Measure the Earth, he chronicles the stories of the scientists and scholars who cut their way through the jungles, crossed the arctic tundra, and braved the world’s highest mountains to discover the truth about our Earth.  In the excerpt below we learn how Christopher Columbus discovered the Earth was much, much larger than previously believed.

As the sun rose at the dawn of the sixteenth century, it shone upon a world mostly uncharted, warming newly discovered lands as yet unexplored… In the Old World of the West, the paucity of geographic knowledge had not deterred men from making maps and atlases, many of which were wildly inaccurate and frequently farcical, showing beautifully engraved continents that did not exist and vague, vast landscapes populated with monsters and cannibalistic savages.

Serene seaways promised wide passages through what were impassable icy wastes that, the cosmographers insisted, led to the riches and spices of the Indies. No one knew from where precisely the spices came, nor did they particularly care. In fact, the strange berries and nuts were grown in the glades of remote East Indian islands and shipped by sea to the coasts of India, from where Moghul traders carried them to Arabia. Arab traders then hauled the baggage overland by camel train through burning desserts to the coasts of Levant, where Genoese, Italian, French, and English sea traders imported the expensive and shriveled goods into the greedy markets of Europe.

The rich had been satisfied to purchase their spices and exotic goods from the last man in a long chain of traders, that is, until the Ottoman Turks expanded their empire from the east in the fifteenth century, capturing a swath of land stretching from Athens to the Crimea. With Sultan Bayezid II’s horde of warriors and warlords controlling access to the Danube, Europe’s great trade river, and dominating all of eastern Europe, exacting high tolls on goods and traffic, the flow of spices from Asia dwindled. At this juncture, an ancient, much copied map of the world suddenly became very important.

The map was from Geographia of Claudius Ptolemy (fl. 150 A.D.) made at the library of Alexandria during the second century. Much “improved” by Italian cartographers, the map suggested to a young Italian navigator by the name of Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) that there might be a sea route to Cathay and its exotic spices. Columbus reasoned that, the earth being round, he could bypass the Turkish obstruction simply by sailing west until he reached the exotic east.

When Columbus first spied the New World from his flagship, Santa Maria he knew exactly where he was because he had a sea chart. He had discovered, he was certain, the eastern outliers of fabled Japan, gateway to the spice lands. Unfortunately, his chart was hopelessly wrong…But Columbus did not know this, and there is no reason why he should have. As far as he was concerned, he had been proved right and had found Japan at the very eastern limits of the spice-rich East.

Paolo Toscanelli, a Florentine cosmographer, is supposed to have provided both inspiration and the chart Columbus took with him on his very first voyage of discovery. It was based, for the most part, on Ptolemy’s ancient map of the world, embellished by the salty tales of coastal traders, fishermen, and an “unknown pilot” who had supposedly seen the fabled lands. Ptolemy’s world was the Greek world and was a perfectly round, spherical world. Toscanelli, Columbus, and the natural philosophers of the day accepted this fact almost without question.

From this certain knowledge of a round world, and equipped with the great map, Columbus calculated that his sailing distance west to Japan would be a mere 2,760 miles (4,440 km). In 1492, as his little fleet sailed further and further westward, with no sight of the promised land, Columbus grew increasingly worried, yet he kept his thoughts to himself, confident in his own abilities and having faith in his Florentine map. The crew was frightened and the men were becoming mutinous when, on 12 October (after 36 days at sea), young Juan Rodriguez Ber Mejo saw land from the prow of the Pinta.

When Columbus toted up his sailing distance, he realized that they had gone about 4,500 sea miles (8,230 km), considerably further than his original 2,760 miles; the only conclusion the navigator could infer was that the earth appeared to be a lot larger than everyone thought. A few years later, on his third voyage to the Indies (1498-1500), Columbus made an even stranger discovery.

He was observing the latitude by sighting the Pole Star with his quadrant when something very odd occurred. He was certain he knew where he was from his previous voyages, but the latitude observations appeared to be all wrong.

I found that there between these two straits [the seas between Trinidad and Venezuela], which I have said face each other in a line from north to south, it is twenty six leagues from the one to the other, and I cannot be wrong in this because the calculation was made with a quadrant. In that on the south, which I named la Boca de la Sierpe, I found that at nightfall I had the pole star at nearly five degrees elevation, and in the other on the north, which I named la Boca del Drago, it was almost at seven.

The difference of nearly 2 degrees of latitude for two locations fewer than 70 miles apart could only be explained if the earth, instead of being a perfectly round sphere, had somehow or other manifested some sort of bump near the equator: it was, according to Columbus, deformed.

We might now suggest that the strange anomaly was probably in part the result of his dubious navigational skills and in part to what we would call “atmospheric aberration.” But, in 1498, neither Columbus nor any philosopher of the day was aware that the atmosphere behaves like a giant lens, bending light rays…

Whatever the cause for Columbus’s disconcerting discovery, his thoughts that the earth could be anything other than perfectly round flew in the face of divine perfection; it flaunted the Aristotelian dogma of the church of Rome and challenged the received wisdom of a thousand years. On that starry night in the Caribbean Sea were sown the first heretical seeds of doubt.

I write the elements, I said. Earth. Air. Fire. Water. I imagine myself gone, within them. The river as a woman. The fire as a man. The earth cracked open, so many mouths through which to speak.

And air?

And air is wind. And air is weather. A character—changeable, present.

EARTHQUAKE!

Written by Susan J. Berger
Illustrated by Eugene Ruble
Nonfiction
Published by Guardian Angel Publishing
Ages 6 to 9
Release: April 2009

This nonfiction book will fascinate children young and old. It offers something to every reader. Susan Berger’s facts and descriptions are informative and easy to understand. Eugene Ruble’s illustrations are clever and humorous.

This book is filled with fun factoids. It has charts and graphs, plus illustrations of the inside of the earth. What is an earthquake? Can scientists predict when an earthquake will occur? What do the terms used to describe earthquakes mean? That and more will be found in this book. This book would be a terrific resource for homeschooled children or the school library.

Experiments are included for children to try that will help them understand what happens in an earthquake. Tsunamis are explained. Some famous past earthquakes and tsunamis are described in detail.

This book offers an earthquake craft for kids to make to help with earthquake preparedness. Children and parents learn to put together a plan and a survival kit. There is extensive information on what to have on hand and how to keep supplies fresh.

Susan Berger takes what could be a frightening subject and uses it to inform and empower children. The book is full of useful tips for preparing for the possibility of an earthquake. She tells the reader what to do during and after a quake. Earthquake is a book that gives the reader tips on ways to help others instead of curling up in fear, ending the book on a positive note. I highly recommend this book for children everywhere.

Reviewed by Shari Lyle-Soffe

If aliens came to Earth millions of years in the future, what traces would they find of long-extinct humanity? In the post below Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist from the University of Leicester and author of the forthcoming book The World After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?, ponders what the potential symbols of our world might be for whomever, or whatever, is after us.

Harald V, King of Norway, seems a serious man, and he can certainly make a thoughtful speech. Hence to see him subsequently, with due ceremony, push the button to inflate a life-size model of the biggest pliosaur ever found – 15 metres long, for the record - makes for one of life’s more singular pleasures. It’s an event to be cherished and honed in the memory and passed on down to one’s grandchildren, imagined detail being added with each retelling. The occasion: the official opening of the Thirty-Third International Geological Congress a few weeks ago, when several thousand geologists descended upon the small town of Lillestrøm outside Oslo, to debate the Earth and its eventful past and uncertain future. The royal inflation of the pseudo-pliosaur was one of the organisers’ more fantastical touches, and for all I know the air-filled reptile is still there, lashed to the lawn in front of the conference centre, jaws agape, and painted so vividly as to look more roguish than terrifying.

The return of dinosaurs in some distant future was something that Charles Lyell imagined, nearly two centuries ago, when he contemplated the slow cycles of oceans and mountain chains and of life itself evolving through the immensity of deep time. Henry De La Beche chided him for this fancy, penning a satirical cartoon showing a Professor Ichthyosaurus, flipper pointing to a fossil human skull, teaching infant neo-dinosaurians about the curious life of the humanoid past.

Of course life and the Earth don’t work that way. What’s gone is gone. What will arise, moreover, can’t be predicted from contemplation of the gathering wreckage of a biological empire under siege. To suggest, an hour before the Yucatan meteorite tore into the Earth, that the small scurrying mammals would one day grow to fill the giant shoes of the dinosaurs, would have seemed, then, like the most outrageous of science fiction. Yet this happened. To predict, a few hundred million years ago, that the mighty sea scorpions would not go on forever, would have seemed unthinkable. Yet these armoured crustacean-like hoodlums vanished too, and so today we can venture safely to the beach for a stroll or a swim.

The future is uncertain, and the present is remarkable, not just historically and politically, but geologically too. When thousands of geologists get together to discuss their latest discoveries, then what is happening today seems ever more extraordinary, when viewed through the prism of the deep past. There was one throwaway remark, for instance, noting evidence that the Arctic Ocean has been ice-covered for 13 million years. Well, this is a state of affairs that looks set to end this century, perhaps within decades. And then there is the gathering evidence that the world’s climate, given a sufficient push, can turn on a sixpence, to suddenly refashion itself. How close are we to another such revolution, one wonders?

To have a Professor Ichthyosaurus of the far future musing on the fossilized evidence of our current predicament is, alas, an impossibility. But there may eventually arise a learned hyper-rodent, say, or arrive an inquisitive traveller from Betelgeuse 9. Perhaps these beings might organise scientific congresses too, at which inflatable models of creatures of the long-gone Human Era would be ceremonially inflated. What creature would they choose, then, for maximum dramatic impact? A blue whale, perhaps, for sheer size - or a narwhal, or a swordfish, or a giraffe?

Maybe the alien committee would go for the curiouser, rather than the merely large. They might select, say, that strange sabre-toothed beast, the walrus, gracing an artificial shoreline with an accompanying plastic humanoid for company (as replica of a carpenter, naturally). That might be a fitting symbol for a world – our world – that will still seem a cosmic Wonderland when viewed through that looking-glass of the far future. The shade of the Cheshire Cat might venture, then, one last rueful smile.

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Cartoon for the Dutch Nu.nl news website, about the return of Shell to Iraq to establish an increased oil production.

More at Sevensheaven.nl

Over on El Blogo Longstocko (not actual name) Coe Booth recently posted a piece of interesting note. It's about a little site called Revish and, according to those who know and love it, it's sweeping the nation. Here's how Coe describes it:

Even though it sounds kind of similar to LibraryThing, Revish claims to be different. For one thing, it isn't a book cataloging site. Also, reviews on Revish have to be OVER a certain length. According to their FAQ page, they're not looking for one-line reviews!

In addition to reading and writing book reviews, with Revish you can also keep a reading list and reading journal (which can be shared with others, of course), and you can create and participate in discussion groups.

Unpacking Stereotypes Continued… In this show: Clip is on the Educational podcasting for teaching and learning Directory of the UK , Problematizing the Wild Indian Stereotype, Jesse James : Diga and the Earth is Crying Music: Earth is Crying by Jesse James and Diga Special Thanks to : Kelly Winney, from Windsor, ON, for the Station [...]