These maps will change the way you see the world

Alastair Bonnett has an unusual hobby for a cartography professional: getting lost. A geographer at Newcastle University in the UK, Bonnett sees it as a necessary corrective to a society that relies on maps for basic everyday life. “We’re becoming increasingly bad at dealing with not knowing where things are,” he says. “Sometimes we feel like we’re in control, and sometimes the map feels like it’s in control.”

Bonnett says the ubiquity of maps has made the 21st century a golden age of cartography. Maps are everywhere, used for everything from tracking the spread of disease to finding grocery stores, and they’re an increasingly essential tool in many scientific fields. But despite our obsession with maps, Bonnett worries that we don’t always understand what makes them good or how people have used them for centuries. “We need to take this opportunity to think about our lost cartographic traditions,” he says.

in 40 maps that will change the way you see the world In this book, which goes on sale Sept. 26, Bonnett aims to do just that, orchestrating a journey through diverse cartographic traditions that range from wooden maritime maps from the Marshall Islands to 500-year-old Aztec maps depicting the descendants of Lord 11 Quetzalcatzin, a leader from the region.

Among the works Bonnet has come across and saved for his collection are those that depict rapid global change and geopolitical tensions. Others, from maps of neurons to maps of smell, challenge the very definition of a map. In his words, they all “disturb and disorient” us, allowing us to discover new ways of finding our place in the universe.

This is literally true in the first example in his book, a map of the Laniakea Supercluster, a collection of more than 100,000 galaxies, including the Milky Way. The red dot marks Earth’s current position as part of the Virgo Cluster. The routes of galaxy movement, tugged by gravity and shaped by the expanding Universe, are depicted by glowing lines. The map’s researchers liken the way galaxies flow together to form the supercluster to flowing water in a basin. Our supercluster, whose name means “vast heaven” in Hawaiian, is about 520 million light-years in diameter.

The rational organization of space that characterizes most maps in use today has a much longer history. The 12th century Map of the Locus of Yew^NumberThe 18th century Chinese map is what Bonnet calls the first modern map because it represents space on a grid and allows for fairly accurate depictions of China’s major rivers and waterways. “Yu” refers to Yu the Great, a legendary civil engineer and king credited with making the rivers navigable. The map was carved into stone, allowing rubbings to be made.

China, with its culture of cartography going back thousands of years, is the source of many of the maps in Bonnet’s book. The map was discovered by an amateur historian in 2001 and purports to show the world as Chinese geographers knew it in 1418. A detailed diagram of the world’s coastlines, including Australia, decades before Columbus’ voyages, would be astounding if it were real, but Bonnet says it is almost certainly a fake. It doesn’t resemble any other map of the time, and there is no record of the global voyage it took to create it. Still, he writes, the fact remains that “China is home to one of the world’s most impressive traditions of ancient cartography.”

This 2013 map of modern China also has geopolitical undertones. Asia, depicted vertically, is at the center of the world, and both poles are emphasized, rather than hidden like the usual “embarrassing great-aunt,” Bonnet says. The effect is to emphasize Asia as the center of world power and to show the increasingly ice-free polar waters as a place of economic opportunity. Political boundaries have always been shifting, Bonnet says. But that is increasingly true of natural features, too. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen a time when the physical natural map of the world has been changing so rapidly,” he says.

This detail from a 1593 map shows Aztec leader Lord Quetzalcatzin (in red) surrounded by his descendants claiming land in what is now the Puebla and Oaxaca regions of Mexico. Bonnet calls it “one of the most important maps in the history of the Americas” because it captures a cultural transition point between indigenous and postcolonial societies, incorporating elements of both cartographic traditions.

The latest map colour-codes New York City neighbourhoods by a “Women’s Walkability” index, with green areas being easy to walk in and red areas being difficult. It was created by a team of researchers based on surveys about where women feel safe, as well as data on infrastructure and crime. In general, wealthier areas of the city score higher than poorer ones. This shouldn’t be taken at face value, Bonnett writes, as an example of how maps can reproduce existing inequalities. “A walkability map is also a map of happiness, sociability and connectedness.”

The map can stretch from the top to the bottom of the globe. This tangle of colors shows the structure of the Earth’s mantle beneath the Pacific Ocean, based on reflected seismic waves that spread across the region. Created in 2015 by a team of geoscientists using supercomputers to crunch the numbers from thousands of earthquakes, the map shows the speed of seismic waves as they pass through different materials at different pressures and temperatures within the Earth. The slowest speeds are red and orange, while the fastest are green and blue. Of particular interest to Bonnet is the blue ring on the left side of the map, which shows a fast-moving crustal structure known as the Tonga microplate. The image is just one view of a larger project to create a 3D map of the Earth’s entire mantle.

40 Maps That Will Change the Way You See the World by Alastair Bonnett will be published by Ivea Press in the UK on 26 September and in the US on 17 September.