Earth has been changing it's topography and composition ever since it formed in the cosmos billions of years ago. Mountains have risen, seas formed, continents broken off and merged back together again. Yet that change has usually taken eons to make a noticeable difference. With the growing impact of man, cartographers have to work overtime to map all of the changes caused not only by earthquakes and volcanoes, but by our very own society.
From The New York Times:
In the new edition of “The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World” (Times Books, London, 2007), for instance, there are before-and-after views of the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth-largest lake. It shriveled as Soviet-era irrigation projects siphoned off the rivers that replenished it. A dam completed in 2005 now prevents water from flowing out of the lake’s northern lobe, which is expanding as a result.
The lake’s vanishing and rebirth, easily visible from space, are the work of people.
“The impactful thing is the size of some of these changing features,” Mick Ashworth, the editor in chief of the atlas, said in a telephone interview from England.
The atlas charts the shifting coastline of Bangladesh, for example, where land has been lost to rising sea levels. It identifies islands that are likely to be subsumed by the seas, Tuvalu, Vanuatu and the Marshall Islands among them, and coastal communities that may be forced to move. One of them is Shishmaref, Alaska, located on a narrow island along the Bering Strait, where the break-up of sea ice has left the village more exposed to storms and the sea is advancing at a rate of 10 feet a year.
Climate change, diverting water for farming and industry has taken a tremendous toll on our planet. Watching the near-death and rebirth of the Aral Sea is but one example of how quickly we can force our planet to change its look. The Dead Sea, noted since biblical times has only a few short decades left before it becomes nothing more than sand like the desert around it. The North Pole's ice caps are expected to be gone during the summer in a similar amount of time. Closer to home, the marshes of Jamaica Bay are rapidly disappearing and are expected to be gone altogether in only a few years.
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