The maps and the makers … and how to look objective and omnipotent | The National
▻http://www.thenational.ae/art/20140619/maps-and-their-makers---x2026--and-the-pretence-of-objectivity
The map may have been a cartographic first, but the detailed image of the vast area of seabed where Malaysian Airlines MH370 is believed to have vanished offered little in the way of consolation. The Wallaby-Zenith fracture zone is a place where plateaus rise vertiginously above the seabed and troughs plunge to a depth of almost five miles.
Published in Eos, the weekly journal of the American Geophysical Union, it revealed rather more about our ignorance of the oceans – modern cartography’s greatest terra incognita – and the scale of the task facing the teams searching for MH370 than it did about the missing airliner.
“It is a very complex part of the world that is very poorly known,” said Walter H F Smith, a geophysicist from the laboratory for satellite altimetry at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) while speaking at a press conference.
#cartographie #objectivité #manipulation #propagande #perception
