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Libya
3,000 Dead in Massive Flood
Up to 3,000 people are dead and an estimated 10,000 are missing after Storm Daniel brought heavy rains to Libya on Monday, causing two dams to burst leaving a quarter of Derna completely destroyed by the waters. The flooding also devastated many roads leading to the city, preventing aid from reaching the city. Storm Daniel is the same storm which propelled catastrophic flooding in Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria last week. The American embassy in Tripoli issued a declaration of humanitarian need which will provide some funding for this flood event.
This map depicts the course of the river on which two dams burst and sent floodwaters towards Derna. Click on the map to learn more.
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Ethiopia
Mega-Dam Garners Criticism
Egypt and Sudan have made complaints to the Ethiopian government following the final phase of filling the reservoir behind the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). The dam has been under construction since 2011, and has been dogged by controversy since the beginning. Constructed on the Blue Nile River for a hydroelectric power plant, Egypt and Sudan believe the dam threatens to cut off their water supply, with Egypt characterizing the dam as an “illlegal, unilateral measure” and an “existential threat.” However, Ethiopia hopes the dam will give it the capacity to supply electricity to the half of its 120 million people who live without power.
This map depicts the location of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) and Egypt’s Aswan High Dam on the Nile. Click on the map to learn more.
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Graphic Source: Deutsche Welle
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United States
Lithium Deposit May Set Record
A deposit of lithium discovered in an ancient supervolcano in Nevada on the border with Oregon may prove to be the largest known in the world. The discovery of the deposit in the McDermitt caldera in Thacker Pass was detailed in a paper published in the journal Science Advances. Lithium is a valuable mineral resource for the production of lithium-ion batteries, which are proving increasingly important for energy storage from intermittent renewable sources like solar and wind. Heavy international investment by Chinese firms has given China controlling stakes over a large portion of the world’s lithium sources. A domestic find of this magnitude has the potential to increase American energy independence and help foster competition in the market.
This map depicts the locations of the world’s largest-known lithium deposits by type of deposit. The highlighted Thacker Pass deposit, which was recently discovered in Nevada, may prove to be the world’s largest of the mineral. Click on the map to learn more.
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Q: Whose first map of the Arctic contains guesses such as a giant whirlpool, polar pygmies, and the pole itself as a giant, magnetic mountain?
A: Gerardus Mercator
Published in 1606, the earliest known map of the Arctic, Sepentrionalium Terrarum, is filled with colorful guesses. The map’s creator, Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, is best known for the “Mercator projection,” the method of taking the curved lines of the Earth and transforming them into straight ones that can be used on a flat map. Invented for sailors, this map could be used to plot a straight-line course to their destination. In 1569, Mercator came out with a map of the world with this principle. However, in order to make the map useful for navigation, Mercator had to sacrifice accuracy in other areas, stretching the far North and South and making them appear disproportionately larger than those nearer the equator. In this projection, the North Pole would appear so large as to be almost infinite, so Mercator decided to put a small, top-down view of the Arctic in the corner of his world map. This map has a centerpiece of a massive rock located exactly at the pole, labelled “Black, Very High Cliff,” based off a 14th-century friar’s travelogue. He draws the Arctic in four large chunks separated by channels of flowing water, which meet in the middle at a giant whirlpool, and also includes “pygmies, whose length is four feet.” By 1636, up-to-date maps of the region did not include Mercator’s elements in their depiction of the North Pole.
Source Atlas Obscura
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Q: Who incorporated the geographical knowledge of Islamic merchants and Norman voyagers to draw the most accurate map of the world in pre-modern times (1000-1500 CE)?
Stay tuned for the answer to today’s question in tomorrow’s DailyGeo.
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