96 – A Cartogram of the World’s Population

This map is part of a series of cartograms in which the actual geography is distorted in order to demonstrate information about the countries shown. In this case, the point made is that of population, with each country’s size ‘weighted’ to reflect the size of its population. The discrepancies between your average standard world map and this one are obvious – obviousness being a good indicator of how good a map is.

For example: on a normal world map, Australia (7,7 million sq. km) would dwarf Indonesia (1,9 million sq. km). Yet the opposite happens here. Oz might be big, but it’s a Big Empty, holding no more than 20,5 million people (2006 est.) Meanwhile, the emerald archipelago to Australia’s Near North is teeming with 223 million people (2005 est.), enough to fill eleven Australias. That imbalance is reflected well in this map. Australia almost drowns in the ocean, just like that other sparsely populated ‘western’ outpost in the far east, New Zealand.

A similar reversal of roles exists between Russia (17 million sq. km, 142 million inhabitants) and China (9,6 million sq. km, 1,3 billion inhabitants). The population map reduces Russia to a thin sliver of land, insignificant compared to the giant that is China, which dwarfs just about any country far or close by, except India. Together, these two Asian countries account for fully one third of the world’s population. Incidentally, the number of Indians is slated to surpass China’s population later this century.

The map similarly illustrates Canada’s relationship with its ‘bigger’ neighbour to the south. Elsewhere, regional dominances become more apparent also. Ethiopia, currently actively supporting one side in the Somali civil war (if one can call it that) dominates eastern Africa, Nigeria is by far the larger country of western Africa – in fact, the largest of all of Africa, larger than Sudan, which is huge and empty. The preliminary results of last year’s Nigerian census seem to indicate a population of about 140 million people, indeed surpassing by far Africa’s second most populous nation, Egypt.

This map also allows for quick ‘guesstimates’ of which countries have an equally large population. The matches can be instructive and surprising. France and Egypt seem about the same size, as are Germany and Ethiopia. Ireland is more or less the same size as Haiti.

Several visitors to this blog pointed me to this series of ‘distorted’ maps, which are the result of a collaboration between the universities of Sheffield (UK) and Michigan (US) and can be seen on this page of the Daily Mail newspaper, under the heading ‘How the world really shapes up’. Other map distortions reflect:

alcohol consumption (Western Europeans drink a third more than average, but Ugandans are the world champions);
HIV prevalence (Africa is oversized in this map);
house prices (Europe, and especially Britain are oversized);
military spending (the US takes up 45% of the ‘land mass’ in this map);
war deaths (DR Congo accounts for 27%);
toy imports (US at one, followed by Britain and Europe);
and toy exports (with a huge Hong Kong attached to a giant China).

95 – The Incredible Shrinking Lake (Chad, That Is)

Lake Chad is not the only inland body of water that’s disappearing under the dual assault of climate change and human overuse. Lake Aral, in formerly Soviet Central Asia, is well known for the picturesque images of boats stranded in the desert. I don’t know how fast the process went with Lake Aral, but as this map demonstrates, it’s been mercilessly swift with Lake Chad. The last of these five maps dates from 2001. I even wonder whether six years later there still is a Lake Chad. Gonna check up on that in a minute.

Lake Chad is – or was – a large inland lake in Africa. It is surrounded by four countries: Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon. The lake is very shallow, 7 metres at its deepest, and is dotted by islands and mudbanks. Most of its shorelines are made up of marshes. Some 90% of the lake’s water comes from the Chari River.

The present-day lake is the remnant of a much larger inland lake, about 400.000 sq. km at its largest around the year 4000 BC. It has shrunk in summer and expanded (but mainly shrunk) ever since. When Europeans first surveyed in in 1832, it still was one of the largest lakes in the world. In 1908 and 1984, it almost dried out. In the 1960s, Lake Chad again covered 26.000 sq. km, making it the fourth largest lake in Africa. By 2000, it had shrunk to a mere 1.500 sq. km, with an average depth of no more than 1,5 metres.

Lake Chad’s shrinkage has increased in recent decades, due to population growth in the adjacent countries. Nowadays, more than 20 million people surrounding at least partially depend on the lake for potable and irrigable water. Overgrazing surrounding the lake, and subsequent decline in vegetation has caused extensive desertification. According to experts, this environmental degradation is due to resource depletion rather than global warming.

Wikipedia has no recent update on the state of the lake, a quick trawl through the internet shows up this report by the BBC dated January 15, 2007, stating its present size as 500 sq. km and predicting it could disappear in the next two decades.

This map taken here.

94 – Gastronomic Cartography: the France of Breads

This brilliant map is in a gang of one, for the time being – gastronomic cartography. An intriguing category nonetheless: La France des pains (‘The France of Breads’) visually demonstrates the place of origin of France’s different local types of bread. It turns out they come in a lot more shapes than the one foreigners (non-French foreigners, that is) usually associate with a French baguette.

That shape is represented by the six stick-like loafs forming a little fence across the north of France:

30 – pain de fantaisie (fantasy bread)
31 – pain marchand de vin (wine merchant’s bread)
33 – pain saucisson (sausage bread) and
35 – pain boulot (work bread);

but also by

46 – pain condé (?)
46 – le tordu (twisted bread); and
69 – le phoenix, pain viennois (the phoenix or viennese bread) further south.

Interesting to note is that the elongated shape of the ‘typical’ French bread has quite some competition from the atoll-shaped bread:

12 – (illegible)
44 – pain collier (collar bread)
43 – le fer à cheval (horseshoe bread)
49 – (illegible)
52 – la couronne bordelaise (the crown of Bordeaux)

Other local French bread types more notable for their name than for their shape, are:

4 – pain chapeau (hat bread)
13 – pain bateau (boat bread)
22 – pain polka (polka bread)
28 – petit pain empereur (little emperor bread; why don’t they just call it ‘Napoleon’?)
48 – pain chemin de fer (railroad bread)

This map taken from this page, under the header ‘Gallery of Data Visualization – The Best and Worst of Statistical Graphics’. Anyone with sharper eyesight, a better version of map or some knowledge of French is very welcome to help me decipher the rest of the map!

93 – Lewis Carroll’s Ocean Chart

This map is an illustration in ‘The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in 8 Fits)’, a nonsensical and somewhat grim poem by Lewis Carroll, who is better known for ‘Alice in Wonderland’. All the illustrations in ‘Snark’, first published in 1876, are by Henry Holiday, whom I therefore suppose to also be the author of this map.

The map is an Ocean Chart owned by the Bellman, one of the main characters in the book. It helps the Bellman and his fellow adventurers, who are hunting for a legendary beast called the Snark, to cross the ocean and arrive at a strange land. The absurdity of the map is that it only shows ocean, literally illustrating nothing, and therefore cannot be a very helpful navigating tool. Here’s an extract from ‘Snark’ relating to said map:

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.

“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?” 
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
“They are merely conventional signs!

“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank: 
(So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best—
A perfect and absolute blank!”

92 – Secret Soviet Plans for the Complete Removal of the North American Continent

This recently unclassified, formerly top secret document released by the Russian State Archives illustrates (quite literally) the lengths the Soviets wanted to go to in order to win the Cold War: not just the defeat of the capitalist USA, but its complete removal off the face of the earth.

The document is dated February 26, 1973 and is signed by Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB. In the mid-1980s, Andropov rose to be secretary-general of the CPSU (effectively the Guy in Overall Charge), in which post he was the immediate predecessor of Mikhail Gorbachev (*).  

It reads, in part: “This is a scheme of assumed changes in geographical structure of Earth continents which may happen as a result of correction of gravity field of the Earth by the A-241/BIS device.” 

I’ve never heard of such a device outside the realm of fiction (the Doomsday Machine in the movie Dr Strangelove springs to mind), so I suppose this document is a hoax.

The map is presented at this page of bldgblog, an excellent blog about “architectural conjecture, urban speculation and landscape futures”.

(*): Not. Please check the comments. 

91 – Early 20th Century Balkan Aspirations

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire was called the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ because it didn’t seem able to hold on to its possessions in the Balkans. However, as the Balkan nations managed to cast of the Ottoman yoke, their own overlapping territorial claims led to conflicts that have dominated the region up until the 1990s.

In 1912-13, in the first of two Balkan Wars, the Balkan League (Bulgaria, Montenegro, Greece and Serbia) conquered Macedonia, Albania and most of Thrace, only to turn on each other in the second Balkan War over the division of the territory gained. The main reason for this was the fragmented distribution of the different ethnicities in the Balkans, and after centuries of Ottoman dominance, the absence of well-established borders between them. 

As shown in this map, dated 1912:

Servia (later uniformly called ‘Serbia’ in English) was a small, recently independent statelet smaller even than present-day Serbia. Yet it felt compelled to champion the rights of all southern Slavic peoples and extend its reach all the way up to Trieste, at that time part of Austro-Hungary.

Similarly, fairly newly independent Bulgaria aspired to create a ‘Greater Bulgaria’, encompassing all of ancient Macedonia, up to the Greek port city of Salonika. In the nineteen-nineties, disagreements of what constitutes Macedonia (territorially and ethnically) led to disputes between Greece (which sees itself as the heir of a purely Greek Macedonia) and the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia (called FYROM by its acronym, because of Greece’s objections to use of the name by these Slavic ‘interlopers’).

Romania (then still called ‘Rumania’) wanted to extend its reach to include Bessarabia (presently Moldavia, then part of Russia) and
Transylvania, then part of Austro-Hungary. Both territories are home to large populations of ethnic Romanians.

Greece, at that time consisting only of the peninsula of the Pelopponesos, Athens and surroundings and a small part of the mainland to the north, sought to extend its domain to include Crete, Cyprus, most of the Aegean islands, the southern half of Albania and Macedonia, all the way up to and including Constantinople (present-day Istanbul).

It’s interesting to note that none of these four countries managed to reach the maximum extent of its territorial ‘aspirations’, as shown in this map.

Greece comes close, although its northern border doesn’t quite extend as far north as aspired to in this map – it includes the southern part of Albania, which today is still home to a Greek minority. Also, Turkey managed to hold onto a sliver of Europe beyond Istanbul (Constantinople) that in this map is divided between Greece and Bulgaria. Finally, in 1974 a Greek-sponsored coup on Cyprus, intended to bring the island under the control of the Greek government, led to a Turkish invasion, the split of the island in an unrecognised Turkish and an independent Greek part. In the 1990s, Serbia’s ‘Greater Serbian’ ambitions led to the bloodiest European conflict since the Second World War. Although a Serbian republic was established in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia proper lost all other formerly Yugoslav territories. Even Montenegro, ethnically closest to Serbia, declared its independence from what remained of the Yugoslav federation last year. And though Kosovo nominally still is a Serbian province, in practice it is an independent entity under the tutelage of the United Nations.

Bulgaria’s designs on Macedonia and on access to the Aegean Sea were never realized, and Romania, while managing to incorporate Transylvania after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, never succeeded in annexing Bessarabia (or Moldova, as it is now known) after it became independent at the end of the twentieth century… 

500.000 Hits

This blog has been up since September 2006. In that half year, I’ve posted 90 maps, gotten about 1.000 comments – most of them interesting and/or favourable – and just now the traffic on this site tallied up to 500.000 hits… That’s way more than I imagined for a blog merely intended to be a storage room for some strange maps I like.

Thank you all for your interest and contributions! And especially for any maps you suggest, some of which I’ve already posted, others I will in the future, all of which I appreciate greatly. It’s been cool to find out so many people like maps.

90 – The Limburg Split of 1839

The map-on-a-stamp in this post is again taken from the wonderful site called Dan’s Topical Stamps.

To American ears, the word ‘Limburg’ conjures up the mighty stink emitted by so-called Limburger cheese. In one of Mark Twain’s stories, its smell is even mistaken for that of a corpse. And the cartoon character Mighty Mouse can only be weakened by Limburger cheese – a bit like Superman with Kryptonite.

In Europe, where the same cheese is known under different names, ‘Limburg’ usually refers to one of four places. There is the German city of Limburg an der Lahn and the Belgian city of Limbourg. Furthermore, both Belgium and the Netherlands have a province called Limburg.

Both provinces were unified into one administrative region by the French from 1795 onwards. This territory was known as the ‘Department of the Lower Meuse’ (Département de la Meuse inférieure) after the river that flows through it. Later, when present-day Belgium, Netherlands and Luxemburg formed one state as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands (1815-1830) it was renamed the province of Limburg, after the city of Limbourg (which incidentally formed no part of the province of Limburg, as it lies in the Belgian province of Liège).

When Belgium split off from the Netherlands in 1830, Limburg was going to go to Belgium in its entirety. But the Dutch mounted an initially successful campaign, which had to be called off under international pressure. This military stalemate is at the basis of the split of Limburg in a western, Belgian half and an eastern, Dutch one, as the city of Maastricht remained occupied by a Dutch general.

In 1839, the Treaty of London officialised the split, thus providing the Netherlands with its present-day borders and with its southern ‘tail’. Despite a separation that has lasted for about 175 years, a feeling of kinship between the Dutch and Belgian halves of Limburg persists, mainly due to similarities in culture and dialect (of Dutch) and by feelings of neglect by their respective ‘far-away’ capitals, The Hague and Brussels.

This stamp was issued by both Belgium and the Netherlands in 1989 at the 150th anniversary of the Treaty of London. That treaty not only lost Belgium half of Limburg, it also required the new country to remain perpetually neutral (which it did in the run-up to both World Wars – after the second one, Belgium was one of the founders of NATO).

The design on the stamp shows the territory of the Netherlands from the southern IJsselmeer to northern Belgium. The territory of Limburg west of the Maas River is colored a light orange and belongs to Belgium, while the territory north of the Netherlands-Belgium border and west of the Maas is a darker orange and belongs to the Netherlands.

89 – Bushlandia vs. Reality

An updated version of the famous United States of Canada vs. Jesusland map (see posting #3 on this blog). That map represented the outcome of the US presidential election in 2004, with the ‘red’ states (those that voted for incumbent president Bush, the Republican party candidate) far outnumbering the ‘blue’ states, (preferring the Democratic candidate, senator John Kerry).

The ‘blue’ states were concentrated on the West Coast and in New England, but in this map have almost completely conquered the ‘red’ heartland of the US. This map dates from mid-2006, and presumably represents president Bush’s approval ratings – I suppose they’re highest in Bushlandia, which is composed of only three, relatively sparsely populated and mainly rural western states: Idaho, Wyoming and Utah.

This map found on altacocker.com, a self-declared ‘anti-Bush website’.

88 – Neuschwabenland, the Last German Colony

 

Ever since it achieved unification in 1871, Germany craved colonies as a matter of national pride. But by the late nineteenth century, most of the ‘uncivilised world’ was already carved up by established European powers. In an eleventh-hour effort, the German Empire acquired a few scraps of Africa and Asia – mainly wild or empty lands nobody else wanted. And even this colonial empire, with the bits few and far between, was taken away after Germany’s defeat in the First World War.

The revanchist mood that swept the Nazis into power in the early nineteen thirties also revived Germany’s by now totally outdated colonial ambitions. Those were turned to the last great area of the globe that was not yet colonized: Antarctica – big, cold and empty. At the beginning of 1939, a Nazi expedition explored a hitherto uncharted area of the Antarctic. By foot and plane, the Nazis surveyed an area between latitudes 69°10’ S and 76°30’ S and longitudes 11°30 W and 20°00’ E, totaling 600.000 sq. km. They called it Neuschwabenland, or New Swabia.

At first glance, Neuschwabenland doesn’t warrant much enthusiasm. Most of it is covered in eternal snow and ice, with only a few places ice-free, mainly around a few hot springs. Yet annexation was an express purpose of the expedition, led by captain Alfred Ritscher, ordered by Hermann Göring himself. Before leaving, the expedition members received practical advice from Richard E. Byrd, an American admiral and experienced polar explorer.

The German airline Lufthansa lent one of its ships, the ‘Schwabenland’ for the expedition – hence the name that was given to the territory. The vessel was a so-called ‘catapult ship’, having before proved itself as a transporter and postal carrier in the South Atlantic. The ‘Schwabenland’ had two Dornier aircraft on board, named Boreas and Passat. A steam catapult was used in flinging the planes, each weighing 10 tonnes, off the ship.

The planes were used for reconnaissance flights over the impassable hinterland of the heretofore unexplored part of Antarctica, and were thus instrumental in the German Antarctic Expedition. Each plane could stay in the air for a maximum of nine hours and no inland airfields were constructed, so this provided the outer limit for the area to be explored.

In total, 350.000 sq. km were overflown and more than 11.000 photographs taken during 15 flights. These pictures were used in drawing up a map of the territory. During the flights and expeditions on foot, hundreds of Nazi German flags were dropped to symbolize Germany’s possession of the territory. Additionally, the expedition established a provisory base camp and reported that around the so-called Schirmacher See there existed some vegetation, due to the hot springs near the lake.

Capt. Schirmer was prevented from mounting a second, improved expedition by the outbreak of World War Two. During the war, no official activities were registered in the whole of Antarctica. After the war, Norway assumed a protectorate over the area, annexing it to Queen Maud Land. Following the 1957 Antarctic Treaty (the one ‘freezing’ all territorial claims), Norway named its new acquisition after princesses Martha, Raghnild and Astrid.

In 1952, the government of the new Federal Republic of Germany exercised its right, based on the Nazi exploration, to name geographical features in the area.  The German polar research station ‘Georg von Neumayer’ is located in what was formerly known as Neuschwabenland. Thus endeth the official version.

A plethora of rumours maintains that Neuschwabenland wasn’t abandoned by the Nazis after the first expedition. In fact, a few crew members of the ‘Schwabenland’ stated that they made several trips to the Nazis’ Antarctic colony, transporting military equipment and heavy tools for mining and tunneling. This must be the origin of the legend that several submarines filled with top-level Nazis fled Europe as the war was ending, finding refuge in a secret network of underground bunkers in Neuschwabenland.

Some stories even maintain that this little Nazi hideaway is the real origin of UFOs (or rather Reichsflugscheiben) – as they really are a German invention rather than an extraterrestrial one.

This map is taken from this page at www.hi-story.de, a German-language history website.

87 – The Whole World In A Cloverleaf

Heinrich Bunting (1545-1606) knew the world didn’t really look like this. There are enough maps in his works (such as Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae) to indicate he knew the continents had an irregular, and not a symbolic shape.

Yet he delighted in drawing other symbolic maps, examples of which can be anthropomorphic (Europe as a virgin) or hippomorphic (Asia as a winged horse). This particular map is a tribute to Buntings hometown Hanover, as the text above the map indicates: Die ganze Welt in einem Kleberblatt welches ist der Stadt Hannover meines lieben Vaterlandes Wapen (‘The Whole World in a Cloverleaf, Which Is The Coat of Arms of Hannover, My Dear Fatherland’).

The map shows a world divided into three parts (Europe, Asia and Africa), connected at a single central point: Jerusalem. This is essentially still the same symbolic map of the world as the one first devised by Saint Isidore in the seventh century. Isidore’s ’T and O’-shaped map, itself inspired by Scripture, influenced Christian European mapmaking up until the age of discovery.

That age would be the one Bunting grew up in. He and his contemporaries were among the first generations of Europeans to know Isidore was wrong – but it’s almost impossible to resist imagining how this centuries-old archetype of a map took a while to be erased out of the common memory of cartographers.

Bunting’s map is nice in that it combine symbolism with realism: in the bottom left corner a piece of land is named America. Strange is that a similar detached piece of territory at the top of the map is labelled Denmark and Sweden. Bunting must have known that Denmark was contiguous with the European Continent…

Some named countries and places (not all are easily readable) on the three continents are, left to right:

Europe: Hispanien (Spain), Mailand (Milan), Welschland (Welsh? Walloon? Country), Frankreich (France), Lothringen (Lorraine), Roma (Rome), Deutschland (Germany), Ungarn (Hungary), Polen (Poland), Preussen (Prussia), Griechenland (Greece), Türken (Turks)

Africa: Lybia, Egypten, Morenland (Land of the Moors), Königreich Melinde (Kingdom of Melinde) , Caput Bonae Spes (Cape of Good Hope)

Asia: Siria, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Chaldea, Persia, India

86 – A Map of Germany’s Euroregions

 

It seems impossible to find an online map showing all of the European Union’s so-called Euroregions. Why doesn’t the EU showcase these transnational regions, conceived to promote economic development and cultural understanding among neighbours that too often in the past have been strangers or enemies? Maybe because the concept is too utopian, or the results are just too plain boring?
 

A ‘Euroregion’ should not be confused with a ‘European region’. A Euroregion (sometimes also called ‘Euregion’ or even ‘Europaregion’) is a structure for cooperation between at least two different European countries, mainly but not exclusively EU member states – but in any case international. A European region is the official description of the governmental level immediately below that of national sovereignty and therefore necessarily intranational – e.g. the Bundesländer that make up the Federal Republic of Germany.
 

Many if not most EU citizens reside in a Euroregion, yet they probably would be hard-pressed to name theirs. One main reason for this is that Euroregions tend to bind together areas that are historically, culturally and economically distinct and don’t share much more than a border. This might a deliberate attempt to create a new European structure other than that of the old nation-states, which proved so destructive over the course of two World Wars.
Conversely, great pains seem to have been taken to avoid setting up transnational regions that might re-awaken lingering conflicts or re-ignite irredentist claims. For example, there is no ‘Basque Euroregion’. In fact, the only Spanish-French Euroregion includes just about every border region except the Basque areas of both countries.
 

This deliberate artificiality is reminiscent of the way the French Revolution did away with the established regions of France in an attempt to create a unitary, centralised state: by breaking the handful of ancient provinces up into almost a hundred small départements which stressed geographic features rather than historical references.
 

So Euroregions shouldn’t be considered ‘statelets in waiting’. They have no exclusive legislative, judicial or executive powers. At most, they share a permanent secretariat and a small staff, pooling the local and regional powers they were given in each constituent region’s national context for the common good.
 

Which could be something like cross-border police coordination and cooperation. Doubtlessly very useful, but also quite mundane – rendering Euroregions invisible to all but those directly involved in their workings. This is a nice map I found showing all the Euroregions Germany shares with its many neighbours… And at the same time demonstrating the peculiar EU penchant for naming stuff in a way reminiscent of maladroit Soviet acronyms. Anyone able to offer up some more information on the history or function of these specific Euroregions or able to provide a map of all the Euroregions in the EU, please do!
 

Clockwise, from the top (with abbreviations for the other than German participating countries between brackets):

Region Schleswig-Sonderjylland (DK)
Fyns Amt-K.E.R.N. (DK)
Storstroms Amt-Ostholstein/Lübeckb (DK)
Pomerania (SE, PL)
Proeurop Aviadrina (PL)
Spree-Neisse Bober (PL)
Neisse (PL, CZ)
Elbe-Labe (CZ)
Erzgebirge/Krasnokori (CZ)
Egrensis (CZ)
Bayerischer Wald/Böhmischer Wald/Unterer Inn (CZ, A)
Inn-Salzach (A)
Salzburg- Berchtesgadener Land –Traunstein (A)
Inntal (A)
Zugspitze/Wetterstein-Karwendel (A)
Via Salina (A)
Bodensee (A, CH, LI)
Trirhena (CH, F)
Centre (F)
Pamina (F)
Saar-Moselle-Avenir (F)
Saar Lor Lux Rhein (F, L, B)
Maas-Rhein (B, NL)
Rhein-Maas-Nord (NL)
Rhein-Waal (NL)
Euregio (NL)
Ems-Dollart (NL)

Die Watteninseln (NL)

85 – Inside the Hollow Earth

If the Earth is hollow, where does all that magma spewing out of all those volcanoes come from? Somebody must have a half-convincing answer to that question, presumably that handful of people who still believe the Earth is an empty shell. The idea seems quite ludicrous now, but in pre-scientific times, it at least appeared to make sense: if Heaven was a place in the skies above, where else would Hell be than somewhere deep below our feet?

Harder to understand is why the idea survived several centuries of scientific progress, including the powerful notion of nature’s horror vacui. In a 1692 scientific paper, Edmund Halley – yes, he of comet fame – put forth the idea that Earth consists of a shell about 800 km thick, and of two inner concentric shells and an innermost core with about the same diameter as the planet Mars.

Halley did have scientific grounds for his rather bizarre thought-construct. It tried to explain why compass readings could be so anomalous: each of the inner spheres had their own magnetic poles and rotated at differing speeds. To compound his error, Halley proposed that the inner spheres might be inhabited and that the inner atmosphere was made up of luminous gases that, when escaping outward, cause the Aurora borealis.

Later theorists came up with variations to Halley’s model. In the seventeenth century, Leonhard Euler proposed a single-shell hollow Earth with a small sun (1.000 km across) at the centre, providing light and warmth for an inner-Earth civilisation. Others proposed two inner suns, and even named them: Pluto and Proserpine.

In the early eighteenth century, American John Cleves Symmes Jr supplemented the theory with the suggestion of ‘blowholes’: openings about 2.300 km across at both poles. Symes apparently was utterly convinced by his own theories: he campaigned for an expedition to the North Pole.  The intervention of president Andrew Jackson was needed – to stop it, that is.

Quite unbelievably, the hollow Earth idea persisted into the twentieth century, when the study of plate tectonics and the like made it obvious that the Earth couldn’t be hollow. Yet hollow Earth books and theories multiplied, many based on Symmes’ work. In 1913, Marshall Gardner wrote A Journey to the Earth’s Interior, even built a working model of his hollow Earth – and patented it.

More recent theories suggest a hollow Earth inhabited by the creatures that fly UFOs across our skies, or by dwarves, dragons, other ‘lost races’ or ‘ascended masters’ of esoteric wisdom. Some proposed new ‘blowholes’ are located in Mount Shasta (California), Mammoth Cave (Kentucky), the Mato Grosso (Brazil), Mount Epomeo (Italy) and the pyramid of Giza (Egypt).

The pulp science fiction magazine Amazing Stories ran with a fantastic tale called the Shaver Mystery from 1945 to 1949. It entailed a series of supposedly factual stories by Richard Sharpe Shaver, claiming a superior prehistoric race had built subterranean caves, now inhabited by the ‘Dero’, their degenerate descendants. These ‘Dero’ use the advanced machinery inherited from their superior forefathers to torment us on the surface of the planet.

The hollow Earth theory was quite popular in twentieth-century Germany; it’s even claimed that Adolf Hitler gave the Hohlweltlehre credence in so far as that he ordered an expedition to spy on the British fleet by aiming cameras at the sky – a claim without historical proof, however. An even crazier theory holds that Hitler and other top Nazis escaped the Allies by fleeing to the inner Earth via an entrance in Antarctica.

The hollow Earth theory has a particularly strong hold on the imagination of writers (such as E.A. Poe, Jules Verne, E.R. Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft and Umberto Eco, who have all used the idea in their fiction). A sub-genre postulating a hollow Moon seems to have died out after the 1969 moon landing.

In some hollow Earth theories, there is a city or civilisation at the core of the Earth called Agartha (sometimes spelled Agartta, Agharti or Agarttha). This seems to derive from Aryavartha, which to the Hindus is the place of origin of the Vedas. An alternative name for this city is Shamballa (or Shambalah), which is Sanskrit for ‘place of peace’. Chinese, Russian and Kirgiz folklore all have their own names for a similar place. Sometimes, both names are used simultaneously (as in this map), with Agartha designating the whole interior and Shamballa the main city.

Despite its age, the name of Agartha pops up in relatively recent popular culture, indicating that is was popularised probably only in the twentieth century. ‘Agartha’ is the name of a Miles Davis album, a song by Afrika Bambaataa, and is mentioned in Umberto Eco’s book ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’.

This map taken from this page at 2012 Unlimited, apparently an Australian website providing information on several esoteric and/or futuristic subjects.