Introducing the Retrofuture Series

I’ve always been fascinated with maps from the 1800s into the 20th century.

Old enough to show a very different world from today, but modern enough to be accurate, maps from this era overlay well with contemporary geospatial data. This allows cartographers to modify with current data–digital elevation models and other digital layers generally align nicely with these antique maps.

The geography and history of the American west was plotted, divided, and divvied up using USGS maps. The United States Geological Survey mapped out the new American territories over the course of over a century, and left a cartographic legacy that were practical for the ranchers, miners, and timber companies, but also beautiful and elegant. What always catches my eye are the areas of great change–the cities, the desert canyons filled with water, the marshlands converted to farms with levees and dikes. To see a map of these areas before their transformations is a view into another world, a time machine that lets us see landscapes that no longer exist.

I have been working on another cartographic time machine for years–the final coastlines of a hothouse Earth, the shapes of our coastal cities and estuaries after all the world’s ice caps have melted. Based in estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the sea level rise maps I’ve been making are a way to see thousands of years into a future that none of us will live to experience.

There is a third element–the present. Helping to tie together the past with the future, I am adding modern terrain shading to the antique maps, giving them a contemporary shadow across the timeline…a shadow of the modern world.