233 - The Dutch Moisturize Mars
The pessimist mourns the glass’s half-emptiness, the optimist rejoices that it’s semi-full and the engineer just thinks the glass is twice the size it should be. I wonder what a space engineer would think of this map of Mars, half underwater.
Although the latest scientific evidence seems to indicate there once was water on Mars - laying to rest a controversy that has raged ever since ‘canals’ were detected on its surface – The Red Planet nowadays is rather rocky and definitely dusty, and not even close to moist. To map Mars as if it’s covered with oceans, seas and bays is clearly too Terra-centric.
It might help to know that this map of of a semi-submerged Mars is of Dutch origin. As the Dutch have always struggled to keep their country above sea-level, they might find it impossible to imagine a world without encroaching seas. This map therefore may say less about the precarious environment of Mars than about that of the Netherlands itself, a country not coincidentally named for its disadvantageous position vis-à-vis the North Sea.
None of which explains, however, why this vision of Mars would be upside down, with the Zuidpool (South Pole) at the top and the Noordpool (North Pole) at the bottom of the map. Maybe Dutch engineering isn’t what it used to be.
The map shows several continents protruding from the Martian waves. In the southern (top) hemisphere, these are:
• Gillland (which has far too many l’s in its name for a continent on any planet; and seeing its coast is a dotted line, probably is an ice-island)
• Burchardtland
• Cassiniland
• Lockyerland
• Jacobland
• Keplerland
• Webbland
• Huygensland (ostensibly the biggest continent, extending way down north)
In the northern (bottom) hemisphere, the continents are:
• Fontanaland
• Herschelland
• Dawesland
• Mädlerland
• Rosseland (a protrusion from the polar ice in the north)
From the few names I recognise, the continents seem to be named after astronomers (Keppler, Huyghens, Cassini, Herschel). I’m unsure whether the same applies for the bodies of water, these ones on the western (or is that eastern, since it’s upside down; in any case, the left) hemisphere:
• Maraldi Sea
• Huggins Bay
• Hook Sea
• Zöllner Sea
• Beer Sea
• Lambert Sea
• Newton Strait
• Arago Strait
• Herschell Strait
• Dawes Ocean
• Kaiser Sea
On the other hemisphere, there are:
• De la Rue Ocean
• De la Rue Strait
• Dawes Sea
• Maunder Sea
• Ariy Sea
• Faye Sea
• Tycho Sea
Apart from Isaac Newton and Tycho Brahe (the Danish astronomer with the bronze nose) and names previously used for the continents, I don’t recognise anyone. The tropics are called tropic of Lion (Leeuwskeerkring) and tropic of Aquarius (Watermanskeerkring).
This map, unfortunately undated and unsourced, was taken from the Agile Rabbit Book of Historical and Curious Maps.
The south pole is at the top and the north at the bottom because when you look through a telescope at any celestial body, it comes out ‘upside down’. Astronomical telescopes usually invert the image.
If you’re in the Northern hemisphere, that means south is at the top of your field of view.
Comment by Mark Wolstenholme — January 10, 2008 @
The map picture link is broken at the moment.
Comment by Brian — January 10, 2008 @
Why does north have to be at the top?
Comment by jpr — January 10, 2008 @
@ Mark Wolstenholme:
That must be it, thanks!
@ Brian:
Still? I don’t see any problem with it…
Comment by strangemaps — January 10, 2008 @
Yes, most of the seas appear to be astronomers. Off the top of my head, I can recognise William Huggins, Robert Hooke, Johann Zollner, Wilhelm Beer, Francois Arago, William (or John) Herschel, Edward Maunder, George Airy. It seems a fair bet that the others had something to do with astronomy too.
Comment by Brett — January 10, 2008 @
Why do you assume north is “up”? And with the comment about the telescope… are the poles of all the other planets pointing the same direction as earth’s anyway?
Comment by bobbo — January 10, 2008 @
Hook see could be a reference to Robert Hooke. It appears that most of his observations were microscopic in nature but he was interested in astronomy as well. There are a couple of Dawes who are astronomers as well in the nineteenth century, but that may have been after the creation of the map.
Comment by perpetualstudent — January 10, 2008 @
There’s also a Christiaan Huygens, Dutch mathematician/physicist/astronomer, (also invented the pendulum clock) whose father was also a famous poet.
Comment by David — January 10, 2008 @
Maria Lane, a geographer at the University of New Mexico, wrote a wonderful paper a couple of years back about the cartography of Mars, and how the early map makers followed the conventions of earthly exploration in the inferences they made about Mars in their telescopic “explorations.” I can’t find a version readily available on line, but here’s the citation:
Geographers of Mars: cartographic inscription and exploration narrative in late Victorian representations of the red planet.
Isis. 2005 Dec;96(4):477-506.
Comment by John Fleck — January 10, 2008 @
I want to take a boating trip on the Beer Sea.
Comment by dziban — January 10, 2008 @
Regarding the “North is up” thing… it certainly can be debatable. However, the map wasn’t made in Argentina or Australia. It was made in the Netherlands, where cultural and educational conventions would definitely have North facing upward on a map.
I like the argument that a telescopic view would reverse the poles, though.
Comment by El Santo — January 10, 2008 @
I’m guessing combining forms is responsible for the triple-L in Gillland’s name.
This would be clearer if it were spelled “Gill-land”.
Comment by Darrel Jones — January 10, 2008 @
The map shows up on the post, but not in the WordPress Surfer.
Comment by Brian — January 10, 2008 @
You may also want to consult the maps in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red/Green/Blue Mars series, where an ocean is gradually constructed, and NASA’s Mars elevation maps.
http://images.google.com/images?q=mars+elevation
http://images.google.com/images?q=mars+map
Comment by Leo Petr — January 10, 2008 @
A modern map of Mars global topography is interesting in that it hints at a huge ocean that may have covered much of the planet’s northern hemisphere in the distant past. Recent explorations raise questions about whether such an ocean ever existed, but the debate continues.
Comment by Bill — January 10, 2008 @
There’s a similar (and perhaps more accurate) map included with Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Blue Mars, the third in his Mars Trilogy. Interesting stuff.
Comment by Dave — January 10, 2008 @
The reason astronomical telescopes show views upside down is that turning the scene right side up requires another lens, and every time the light goes through a lens, you lose a litte bit of it. By International Astronomical Union (IAU) convention, a planet’s north pole lies above the ecliptic plane.
Comment by Eadwacer — January 10, 2008 @
Leo Petr beat me to it. If this is interesting to you, you should seriously check out Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars terraforming trilogy.
Comment by thatdamnninja — January 11, 2008 @
It’s great that they named a land after Herschel Walker.
Comment by Cappy — January 11, 2008 @
When I click on the image, I get an error - Could you please fix the image? I would like to have a high-res version of this.
Comment by secretgeek — January 11, 2008 @
Dawes Land! Dawes Sea! Dawes Ocean! (my family name is Dawes but I’m sure I’m not related to any famous astronomers)could be named for
William Rutter Dawes (1799 - 1868)who I believe is the originator of the Dawes Limit, used by telescope manufacturers to specify the angular resolving power of their instruments.
Comment by Jennifer in BC — January 11, 2008 @
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Pingback by Seltsame Karten « nerone — January 11, 2008 @
Every time I look at the feed heading I’m reading “The Dutch Moisturiser Wars”! Anyone else?
Great post as usual - and thanks everyone else for the interesting links.
Comment by saturn5 — January 11, 2008 @
On Earth, when the Sun (as seen from Earth) enters the Zodiac segment Cancer, it is the northern summer solstice, and the Sun is directly overhead for locations on the Topic of Cancer. Ditto for the Tropic of Capricorn and the southern summer solstice.
Since the axis of Mars is not parallel to the axis of Earth, at the Martian solstices the Sun will appear to be (from Mars) in different Zodiac segments than Cancer and Capricorn. Given the names used on this map, I expect that those segments are Leo and Aquarius.
(All of which is complicated by the fact that the Zodiac segments don’t correspond to the constellations — the start of the segment Ares is by definition the location of the Sun at the vernal equinox, but due to the precession of the equinoxes, that point is no longer in the constellation of Ares. But it was 2,000 to 4,000 years ago, when the Zodiac system was defined.)
Comment by Dale Worley — January 11, 2008 @
Saturn5 said: “Every time I look at the feed heading I’m reading “The Dutch Moisturiser Wars”! Anyone else?”
Actually, I keep reading it as “Dutch Moisturizer Bars,” like it’s an ad for soap or something.
Comment by El Santo — January 11, 2008 @
• De la Rue Ocean
• De la Rue Strait
They most likely refers to Pierre de la Rue, a Flemish composer in the Renaissance, during the 15th & 16th century.
I LOVE MAPS!!!
Comment by JTang — January 12, 2008 @
Or Warren de la Rue, a 19th century British astronomer. :)
Comment by Brett Holman — January 12, 2008 @
@ Brian & secretgeek:
If there was an online source for this map, I could refer you there; unfortunately, there isn’t - and I’m not sure I can fix the problem…
@ Leo Petr & thatdamnninja:
I know of that trilogy, and have the same author’s ‘Years of Rice and Salt’ at home, waiting to be read; that would make for an interesting map, too!
@ Saturn5 & El Santo:
I see gangs stalking the narrow streets of Amsterdam, moisturisers in hand, ready to do battle till there’s not an inch of dry skin left. And then afterwards fraternising in those semi-legal bars that draw in tourists from the many countries where moisturizing is illegal…
Comment by strangemaps — January 12, 2008 @
In our solar system, there are two planets–Venus and Uranus–that rotate in the opposite direction from all the others, relative to the plane of the solar system. Uranus’s axis is also tipped almost on its side (as is Pluto’s), which makes which pole is the north one a matter of tricky convention.
To make things even more confusing, in old maps of the Moon and other planets, the directions labeled east and west were conventionally reversed, because they were using a convention based on directions in Earth’s sky, projected up from the Earth below us to the sky above us, which mirror-reverses the compass rose. In the case of the Moon, this convention was still in use when people actually went there, which made their reckoning of directions on the surface somewhat confusing–the astronauts had to be trained that east was west and vice versa.
Comment by Matt McIrvin — January 12, 2008 @
Oh, yes, and there’s also a moon of Saturn–the irregularly shaped and tidally disturbed Hyperion–that has no fixed rotation axis, but tumbles around chaotically, which makes the reckoning of map coordinates completely arbitrary!
Comment by Matt McIrvin — January 12, 2008 @
By the way, the tendency to (mis)interpret dark areas of other worlds as seas–whether they are or not–is both ancient and modern. The dark lava plains on the Moon are called “seas” for that reason. More recently, infrared observations of Titan revealed dark areas that were thought by some to be methane seas, but are actually vast dune-covered plains (there seem to be real lakes near the poles, though).
Comment by Matt McIrvin — January 13, 2008 @
One should also note that for centuries placenaming on maps has been a way to claim ownership and first-rights of a place. Hence the rather obvious Dutch-ness of the map above…
We should be able to guess the date of the map by checking which Dutch astronomers are mentioned (and thus, were already dead at the time), and which are not.
Comment by omnologos — January 13, 2008 @
Excellent blog! I love maps, especially old and strange maps. I want to find some of the old Silk Road. Do you have any? I didn’t see a way to search your blog.
Comment by John — January 13, 2008 @
[...] The Dutch Moisturize Mars [...]
Pingback by Good to Go Pile . . . « Trading for the Masses — January 14, 2008 @
On Mars the lowlands tend to be brighter than the highlands, with the comical result that at least two mountain ranges have watery names: Hellespontus Montes, Nereidum Montes.
Comment by Anton Sherwood — January 15, 2008 @
Gilliland is a not-rare last name.
There in an astronomer named Ronald Gilliland at the Space Telescope Science Institute. But I don’t think he was the one alluded too.
Comment by Rich Rostrom — January 16, 2008 @
HeLLOOO,DO you want to exchange links in blogroll with my website?thanks a lot
http://www.giornale.fm
Comment by ale — January 17, 2008 @
The water bodies mostly seem to be named after physicists who worked on optics, which is fitting for an astronomical effort (some of them might have been astronomers too):
• Maraldi - astronomer, although i’ve only heard of him through the Maraldi angle, which is some kind of geometry to do with honeycombs (or, interestingly, not - see extensive footnotes in a recent edition of D’Arcy Thompson’s ‘On Growth And Form’ for details!)
• Huggins - ?
• Hook - one of the pioneering microscopists, author of the Micrographia; instrumental in the founding of the Royal Society, and all-round founding father of modern science; had a workshop not far from the room where i lived as an undergraduate
• Zöllner - ?
• Beer - physicist, known to modern students for half of the Beer-Lambert law of absorption
• Lambert - physicist, known to modern students for the other half of the Beer-Lambert law of absorption
• Newton - er, Newton
• Arago - ?
• Herschell - William, astronomer, usually with one ‘l’, but you know those crazy Dutch
• Dawes - ?
• Kaiser - ? but could be named after the German emperor, which is the kind of thing people got up to back then (cf most of the Antarctic), although that’d be an odd move for a Dutch scientist
• De la Rue - ?
• Maunder - astronomer, i think - there’s a thing called the Maunder minimum, to do with sunspot activity or something, and somehow connected to the Little Ice Age, so he was probably a helionomer
• Airy - physicist, famous for applied work on the limits imposed by diffraction on resolution of optical instruments, and so known for the Airy disc and Airy limit; there’s also a crater called Airy-0 on Mars that’s used as the defining point for the prime meridian (the Greenwich of Mars, if you will)
• Faye - ?
• Tycho - Brahae, famous Swedish astronomer, had a copper nose
Those are all the ones i know off the top of my head. A quick look at wackypedia would doubtless find the rest.
– tom
Comment by Tom Anderson — January 18, 2008 @
Interesting…
have you not seen the imagined flora and fauna map of Mars yet? ;)
Comment by mehmet12 — January 19, 2008 @
The Mars map is from the Dutch translation of Camille Flammarion’s _Astronomie populaire_, published in 1884 as _De wonderen des hemels_ (”The Marvels of the Heavens”).
The Mars map was reprinted with small changes in nomenclature in the 1894 and 1922 reprints of the same work.
All names can be identified with known physicists and astronomers (living or dead). For instance, Kaiser refers to Frederick Kaiser, the director of the Leiden Observatory. De la Rue is Warren de la Rue. Faye is Herve Auguste Etienne Albans Faye. Dawes is William Rutter Dawes. Huggins is William Huggins. Zollner is Johann Karl Friedrich Zollner. Arago is Dominique Francois Jean Arago.
- rvg
Comment by Robert van Gent — January 22, 2008 @
For anyone trying to view/debug the full size image.
Firefox wont display it, reporting:
The image “http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/map023_h.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
xv reports “Unsupported color conversion request”
EOG (eye of gnome) does display the full-size image.
Comment by Andrew Aitchison — January 27, 2008 @
Some comments from this former Dutchman…
“Gillland” is “land of Gill”, and no, a Dutchman wouldn’t put a hyphen in there. Dutch (like German) makes composite words simply by concatenating the pieces.
The tropic circles are named for Leo (south) and Aquarius (north). Neat, that would be the different zodiac.
Doing things with water (though more usually that means getting rid of some) is a century-old Dutch activity, so this map fits very nicely.
And finally: yes, south on top is the traditional astronomer’s way of displaying maps of the moon and planets, because that’s how you’d see it 1n a (northern hemisphere) astronomic telescope.
Comment by Paul Koning — January 28, 2008 @
So… which is the correct reason for the inversion of the maps? Matt McIrvin’s explanation that the sky is mirror projected from our own earth (which would be VERY confusing to think about) or that a telescope simply inverts the image and that’s how people thus drew maps?
Did they really use an inverted coordinate system for going to the moon? Wow!
I would think that for sheer simplicity - and to choose a single standard - that we would employ the same references anywhere we go - down here or up there. Why unnecessarily complicate matters?
Comment by Jon — February 20, 2008 @
playing a bit I managed to find out how to get a bigger picture…
Just change the value at the end if you want it bigger:
http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/map023_h.jpg?w=4600
Comment by Luca — March 2, 2008 @
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Wow - can I get this map for my Tom-Tom, since that is also of Dutch origin? Heel goed!
Comment by Andrew Snÿder — April 10, 2008 @
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