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.