GEOPORN

Hello and welcome to GEOPORN's first post! This blog is here to post one image anywhere from twice a week to once a fortnight that is either completely mind-blowing, stunningly beautiful, interestingly informative or opens your eyes to aspects of our earth you may not be familiar with. Posts will be mostly based around Geology and Geography but may include snippets of Maths, Physics and Chemistry.

Hopefully I will be able to bring you a novel and interesting compendium of such images but it is inevitable that most of these topics can be found to varying degrees of depth elsewhere on the web. What I hope this blog will do differently is good explanations with no unnecessary faff and that it will have a larger impact by focussing around one image.

For the first few posts I will be slowly "zooming" into our earth and will start of by looking at this map of the world. It is a Waterman butterfly projection so named after its creator Steve Waterman in 1996. It excels where other map fail as it is both easy to read and keeps sizes, areas and angles almost equal throughout. Greenland does not dwarf Africa in it's size or become a scrunched up smidge and we see the full extent of the motherland as it sits atop the surprisingly large eastern giants of Kazakhstan and Mongolia. Another advantage is that we see Antarctica in all it's glory without it being peeled out or excluded entirely.

The earliest form of this map came from Bernard Cahill  and was subsequently improved by Gene Keyes. What Waterman did differently was to base it around his waterman polyhedra. A more complex explanation of these can be found under polyhedra here (with the applet being particularly interesting) but essentially they are formed by creating a large sphere around a single sphere in cube closed packing (CCP) and including only the centre points of the spheres who's centres are within the large sphere and then using these as the vertices of the polyhedra. Cube closed packing is one of the tightest arrangement of spheres possible and is present in many crystal structures and is shown in the diagram below found here. The Waterman butterfly projection (main image) is based on mapping imagery projected onto a W5 Waterman Polyhedra but many variations exist, they just don't look quite so good.

Next time we'll zoom in a bit and take a look at the underlying structure of the Himalayas!