Tag: Contributor: National Geographic Society (U.S.). Cartographic Division

This map is a map very much in our own era. In a collection of antique maps, it is kind of the contrast, if you will, that is useful to make when looking at the maps of three, four hundred years before. I particularly like this map because it essentially accentuates the ocean floor of the Atlantic – something that was clearly not known to the mapmakers of the fifteen and sixteen hundreds. And it is a wonderful map to show the cleavages in the ocean floor as the continental plates are shifting, moving apart from one another here and forcing themselves together there. A great colorful work by the National Geographic Magazine, which in many ways was the state of cartography for 50 years in the middle of the 20th Century.