Global Ocean Representations Sebastian Grevsmühl

To cite this version:

Sebastian Grevsmühl. Global Ocean Representations. Agathe Euzen; Françoise Gaill; Denis Lacroix; Philippe Cury. The Ocean Revealed, CNRS Editions, pp.176-177, 2017, 978-2-271-11907-0. hal- 01668233

HAL Id: hal-01668233 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01668233 Submitted on 19 Dec 2017

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. 17. Global ocean representations

Sebastian Grevsmühl

In images of planet Earth taken A Systemic (unknown at the time) of an all- from space, it is ofen the preponde- Understanding encompassing terrestrial Teory. rance of water that impresses us, like in the famous ‘blue marble’ photo- of the Earth Global geophysical observations graph taken in 1972 during the – that greatly increased in number last Apollo mission. As an icon of Te frst representations of the throughout the 19th century with environmentalism of the 1970s, this oceans as a single unit appeared the institutionalization of Earth imaginary conjures a ‘global view’ in the 18th century. In 1760, Sciences – thereafer promoted an of our Earth. However, one should the engineer Nicolas-Antoine interconnected and global picture bear in mind that no ‘global’ view Boulanger commissioned the of the vast aquatic areas. In the can show the whole Earth, only half engraving of a ‘new map’ which was early 19th century, with the work of it. Of course, cartography was able very innovative, because it used a of Alexander von Humboldt, maps to solve the problem early on, but projection that was quite unusual and graphs begin to circulate, the usual maps of the world intro- for the time. It divided the world describing the ocean on a global duced another bias: they favored the into a ‘terrestrial hemisphere’ and scale, and integrating a holistic emerged parts of the planet. Indeed, a ‘maritime hemisphere’ (Fig. 1), view of the environment. Our portraying aquatic dominance pre- on one side, bringing together all present representations rely directly sents a singular problem because the known emerged lands of the on this tradition of providing the great masses of water are all time, and on the other, showing logical descriptions of the laws interconnected and form a single the vast extent of our water masses. of nature. For example, in recent ocean. For this reason, recent geo- According to Boulanger, this geography textbooks, the image of graphy textbooks prefer to refer to a astonishing distribution could not the global ocean appears as a visual ‘global ocean’, despite the difculties be a matter of chance, and must construction, where land masses involved in representing it. be at the origin of a physical law are represented in the form of patterns and fgures that emphasize mutual dependencies (represented by arrows and feedback loops), ofen including a strong historical dimension capturing the long history of environmental interactions between the ocean, the continents and the atmosphere.

Overcoming the terrestrial ‘bias’

Throughout the 19th century, very few attempts were made to Fig. 1 – New world map by Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger (1760). n reach beyond the logic focusing on

176 | History and representations of the ocean Fig. 2 – Variation of the Dymaxion map by Buckminster Fuller (1943) showing the global ocean. n the emerged parts of the globe, pro- number of faces). One of its remar- global ocean is represented as a single moted by the vast majority of car- kable applications consists in relega- unit, his planisphere has the advan- tographic projections, such as the ting the continents to the periphery tage of being able to visualize global Mercator projection, which remains of the map, melting them into a quasi- ocean processes (such as the ther- largely dominant. However, major continuous coastline that surrounds mohaline circulation) continuously. mapping innovations emerged in the global ocean (Fig. 3). Finally, more Geographers thus still have the will the 20th century, allowing for new recently, Olivier Serret imagined an to overcome territorial conventions in perspectives of the global ocean. elliptical planisphere that retains the favor of a global vision of the ocean, For instance, the Fuller projection surfaces and which is conceived as a which today, remains an exciting feld (projection of the Earth on an ico- model still to be developed. Since the of research. sahedron surface) was published in 1943 in Life magazine, a huge suc- cess with the general public. The ‘Dymaxion Air-Ocean-World’ map, composed of 20 individual triangles that could be cut out of the magazine by the reader, was the fruit of the imagination of American architect Buckminster Fuller. Having no up or down, and no North nor South, the map can be arranged according to the needs and interests of each user. Tus, it was possible to arrange the individual pieces in such a way as to emphasize the global ocean (Fig. 2). Antarctica appears in the middle of Fig. 3 – The coastline of the Earth proposed by Jack van Wijk in 2008 with an ocean, itself surrounded by the a minimum of distortion. © J. VAN WIJK. n other continents. References In the same spirit, in 2008, Jack • H. REGNAULD and P. LIMIDO – Coastal Landscape As Part of a Global van Wijk proposed another type of Ocean: Two Shifts, Geo: Geography and Environment, 2016. projection dubbed ‘myriahedral’ pro- • J.-R. VANNEY – Géographie de l’océan global, Gordon & Breach, 2002. jection (a polyhedron with a very large

Global ocean representations | 177