On the morning of December 26,
2004, Tilly Smith a ten-year-old English girl was holidaying in a beach in Thailand. She
suddenly turned to her mother and said:"Mummy, we must get off the beach now.
I think there is going to be a tsunami."
A recently done
school project had come to Tilly’s mind...
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| "A journey of a thousand miles
starts in front of your feet." — Lao Tsu
The Great Arc Project
More than two hundred years ago, on April 10, 1802, the British surveyor Col. William
Lambton began an ambitious, audacious and mathematically meticulous scientific odyssey at
St. Thomas Mount in Madras (now Chennai). It took four decades to be completed. The
project ended on the foothills of the Himalayas. Lambton carefully laid the baseline,
which stretched across a distance of 12 kilometres between St. Thomas Mount and another
hillock in the southern direction, for the "measure-ment of the length of a degree of
lati-tude" along a longitude," in the middle of peninsular India.
This 12-km-long horizontal at about sea level grew into
what is known as the Great Indian Arc of the Meridian, a gigantic geometric web of
'triangula-tions' roughly along the 78° longitude across the entire length of the
subcontinent covering a distance of about 2,400 km in the north-south direction. At the
end of this massive and perilous exercise, which con-sumed "more lives than in most
contemporary wars" and involved tomes of calculations and equations more complex than
any in the pre-computer age, it was conclusively proved in 1843 that the Himalayas
constituted a mountain range that was higher than the Andes, until then believed to be the
highest. It also established the height of the highest point on the earth, what is now
called Mount Everest.
R. Ramachandran |
The girl
saved a hundred fellow tourists from the tsunami because of a geography lesson about the
giant waves.Tilly Smith urged her family to get off Maikhao beach in Thailand after seeing
the tide rush out and boats on the horizon bob violently.Tilly told the media that credit
for her quick-thinking should go to Andrew Kearney,her geography teacher at her school.
We may not understand all about the mysterious ways of
the world around us but at least we can begin to think like Albert Einstien who said
‘the most incom - prehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible
’. Geography is a subject that helps us make sense of the natural world around
us.Many of us have distasteful memories of geography as a subject that makes us learn and
locate capital cities on the map.An image that needs to be corrected.
Learning
from landscapes
Learning begins from right where you are.Observing and understanding the natural lay of
the land around us is the first thing that we ought to do,but most often dont.Natural and
man-made landscapes teach us a lot about how we interact with nature.
Think spatially
A map is a picture of a place. It gives you a better understanding of that place.It is a
two-dimensional representation of a particular place.Maps are made for many reasons
and,therefore,they vary in content and context.Different maps show different information.
Different symbols are used to represent the features of the environment on a map.
New Geography
Geographic Information Systems,or GIS,offer a large and growing capacity to answer these
and similar questions quickly,efficiently and easily.GIS is revolutionising the ways in
which geographically based or mapable information is
stored,accessed,analysed,displayed,and made available to the public.GIS is being used
in:redistributing state owned lands,law enforcement,utility companies,environmental
resource mapping,emergency response routing,public transportation,pipeline industries and
many other fields.
Mapping technologies are being used in many new
applications. Biological researchers are exploring the molecular structure of DNA,or
mapping the genome; geophysicists are mapping the structure of the earth ’s
core;oceanographers are mapping the oceanfloor;and so on.Mapping techniques are even being
used to explore the relationships between ideas in what is known as concept mapping. |
