Rivers

Map makers tell us that oceans cover 70% of the Earth.  Given the great depths of the oceans, geologists conclude that 97% of the Earth's water is salt water.  Only 3% of the Earth's water is fresh water, and 2/3 of that is locked up in ice caps and glaciers (at least for the time being).  If you are doing the math, you've already concluded that only 1% of the Earth's water is available to maintain us and all other fresh water organisms in the manner of living to which we've become accustomed. 

The Water Planet

Of that 1%, only 30% is surface water (including atmospheric water that may – or in England WILL – precipitate) and 70% is underground.  Of the surface water, 87% is in lakes, 11% in swamps, and 2% in rivers.  I am not making this up. 

I may not be very good at math, but even I can calculate that the 2% of surface water's 30% of fresh water's 1% of all the Earth's water that comprises rivers amounts to only .00006, or 6/100,000 of the Earth's water.  In other words, rivers hold less than 1/100th of 1% of all the Earth's water.  This is small consolation to those who have been experiencing floods, but the numbers don’t lie.

I’ve lived most of my life near rivers.  Not the wide, calm, navigable rivers typically associated with shipping – but the raging and foaming rivers tumbling from the Sierra Nevada over iconic waterfalls, and the violent rivers of Arizona and Utah, endlessly carving magnificent canyons through the desert landscape.  For all their power, the rivers of the American southwest carry very little water – only a small fraction of that carried by the Mississippi.  Yet the economic importance of those rivers is demonstrated by how very little of their waters actually reach the sea – most being diverted to irrigate crops and satisfy domestic needs like flushing toilets and filling swimming pools.  When you think about it, rivers are essential to our way of life.

Yet to a boy reading maps, a river can be more a curiosity than a necessity.  Maps typically depict a river by a squiggly blue line with one end terminating at a lake or ocean.  But the other end just starts – sometimes at a lake or at a glacier, but often where there is no noticeable geological feature.  Is that what rivers do – do they just start, like a line on paper?  Even a ten-year-old boy can conceive tiny drops of rain coalescing into a flash flood, but a flash flood isn’t a river.  A river has a continual flow.  So, where does a river's water actually start its continual flow?  When my teachers couldn’t satisfactorily answer what I thought to be a simple question, I knew I would need to explore a river myself to find out.  I didn't expect it to be easy, but it had to be easier than exploring terra incognita.

First I had to choose a river to explore.  No ten-year-old boy could resist the allure of the Amazon or the Congo.  Yet somehow I intuitively knew that my mother wouldn't allow me to enter jungles infested by mosquitoes and pythons, so I didn't even bother to ask.  Movies depicting killer mummies inhabiting Egyptian pyramids probably disqualified the Nile also.  I hadn’t heard of any monsters inhabiting the Mississippi though, and I convinced myself that no mother would deny her son the opportunity to re-live the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.  So as a ten-year-old boy I resolved to follow the Mississippi to its source, wherever that may be.  I just had to wait for the right time to ask permission.

Somehow, more than half a century of life sidetracked my resolve.  Then one day a few years ago, while Janet and I were touring London, I stumbled upon a footpath sign marking something called the Thames Path, and a long-dormant idea slowly stirred from the recesses of my mind.  The words “I wonder if...” had barely passed my lips, when Janet rolled her eyes in mock disbelief – but she knew what was coming next.  I immediately dragged her off to Covent Garden and into Stanfords Book Store, where I picked up a guidebook and a handful of OS maps.

The book and maps confirmed my hunch.   I didn't need to follow the Mississippi – the English had actually made it easy for me to follow a river to its source.   No mosquitoes, no pythons, no mummies – rather, an easy 180-mile footpath lined with dozens of hotels offering hot showers and soft beds; scores of pubs serving hot meals and cool drinks; and legions of Brits yearning to explain to a ten-year-old boy what exactly it is that England does with more than its share of fresh water.

So if my body can hold itself together for a few more months, and if England’s winter floods will drain as the contour lines on my maps show they are supposed to, I’ll attempt to follow the River Thames to its source.  Then, to be sure I don’t reach any premature conclusions based on flimsy evidence, I’ll actually search out the source of as many other rivers as I can.  Huck Finn would be envious.

                                                                                 

(c) 2014 Ken Klug

Maps and Terrain

When planning a long-distance walk, I always study maps to learn the terrain.  Is the trail uphill or down?  Is it rocky or smooth?  Is it boggy or dry?   With knowledge of terrain, an experienced walker can accurately estimate essential elements, like speed of travel and distance between pubs.  A good hiking map not only shows us the location of roads, rivers, and pubs, but depicts the terrain we’ll encounter when we get lost trying to find them.  Terrain varies with location, and is typically the result of millions of years of geological events affecting the Earth’s crust.

Those of us who attended primary school before the launch of sputnik probably learned that the Earth was shaped like a pear.  Even back then, science had come a long way since asserting the Earth was flat, but scientists held to the pear-shaped theory until astronauts returned with actual photographs. 

Scientific theory is often formulated from flimsy evidence, but once a theory is accepted it takes overwhelming evidence for scientists to change their beliefs.  Galileo had difficulty challenging accepted theory that the Earth was the center of the solar system; Einstein never accepted the theory regarding quantum movement of electrons in atoms expounded by Neils Bohr, but most scientists now accept Bohr’s findings.  (I’m no Einstein, but the relativity of quantum theory to a finding of boredom seems obvious.)  But like everything else, scientists eventually evolve.  I can’t tell you how happy I am that physicians have evolved from days when they applied leeches to patients.  I know some lawyers who still believe in bleeding clients, but even they are a minority.

One of the theoretical observations I remember from school is that, for its size, the Earth is smoother than a billiard ball.  In other words, goes the theory, if the most highly polished billiard ball were enlarged to the size of the Earth, all if its minute imperfections would be exposed as canyons deeper and mountains higher than any on Earth.  That might explain why I prefer to hike on Earth rather than on billiard balls.

If you accept the theory, then its converse is also true: if the Earth were shrunk to the size of a billiard ball, it would be smoother than a billiard ball. (It would also be wetter than a billiard ball, but I’ll save that for a future posting.)  My point is that the flat, two dimensional maps we use may actually be more representative of terrain than we realize.  Indeed, if the Earth’s area shown on a map were reduced to the size of the map, most of our mountains would be flat. 

For example, my AAA roadmap of Great Britain has a scale of 1:1,000,000.  Ben Nevis, the tallest mountain in Britain, is approximately 4,400 feet high.  If Britain were shrunk to the size of my map, Ben Nevis would be about 1/20^th of an inch tall.   The ink used to print contour lines on a typical hiking map may be thicker than the contour itself would be if shown to scale on a relief map.

That concept troubles me, because when I was boy, 3-D relief maps were my favorites.  I loved walking my fingers up mountains and floating them down river valleys.  But it was all fantasy.  My teachers told me that the vertical scale on virtually every relief map is greatly exaggerated for effect.  I couldn’t have been more devastated if they had told me that Jayne Mansfield had implants.

So that’s why maps use contour lines – lines can represent elevation changes more accurately than relief maps can.  Not that contour lines are actually necessary.  Every hiker knows that the land drops on the near side of a river and rises on the far side, that rivers flow downhill, and that oceans are always lower than every place else.  (OK, I’ll concede that there are a few places below sea level, like Death Valley or Holland, where you’ll either die from heat stroke or get your finger stuck in a dike, but in those places you have much more to worry about than contour lines.)  You also don’t need contour lines to know that if you walk against a river’s flow, you’ll be walking uphill.  On a map, if you find a place from which rivers flow in every direction, you can be pretty sure that place is a mountain, even without contour lines. 

Geologists tell us that mountains are caused by three things: volcanoes, uplift (which has nothing to do with Jayne Mansfield), and erosion.  While you don’t normally think of erosion as building mountains, rain and wind can make a mountain by tearing down everything nearby.  Sort of like Barack Obama with health care.  Over millions of years geological events like lava from erupting volcanoes, uplift from colliding tectonic plates, and erosion from mighty rivers and long-winded politicians have smoothed the Earth’s surface to create the flat terrain we know today.  Or at least that’s the theory.

(c) 2014 Ken Klug

Maps and Me

Maps have fascinated me ever since I was a young boy.  I remember having spent many hours one summer in our public library, flipping through the pages of the oldest books I could find because somehow I thought I would discover a long lost map to buried treasure.  I didn’t discover a treasure map, but I probably convinced the librarian that I was a fast reader.

My elementary school geography textbook had maps with blank portions (generally at the polar regions) labeled "terra incognita.”  Nothing stirs a boy's imagination like a mystery, and I couldn't help but imagine myself exploring and filling in the map.  Of course, before I could start exploring I needed to get myself to that terra incognita, which wasn't going to be easy since I barely knew the way to school.

While the other boys would sneak behind the magazine rack at our local soda fountain and peek at pictures in girlie magazines, I hid behind the Rand McNally rack and looked at maps.  While the other boys quietly giggled at how women's shapes differed from men's, I puzzled why on some maps my hometown was shaped like a dot, while on others it had asymmetrical borders.  Eventually, the other boys grew up and stopped giggling, but I neither grew up nor stopped puzzling over maps.

As you may know, maps are a relatively recent invention.  Before there were maps, explorers had no way of knowing what direction they were sailing, which probably explains why so many of them sailed over the edge of the Earth.  You might think that sailors could have told direction by the position of the sun, but in order to do so they needed to know whether it was morning or afternoon. Back in those days nobody had watches. (Asians were making watches, of course, but until Marco Polo initiated trade with the Orient, they had no way to ship them to the West.) Columbus was the first explorer to actually use maps, but his weren't very accurate because North America was mislabeled as India, which is why he called the natives Indians rather than Native Americans.  Just imagine if his maps had labeled North America as terra incognita.

Nowadays, maps are reliable, and despite the "Sir Lost-a-lot" moniker given me by King Arthur, I rarely get lost. My most common navigation errors are due to holding the map upside down. My aged eyes require assistance, but I'm sometimes too lazy to switch to my reading glasses. Perhaps I should hike only in the southern hemisphere where everything is already upside down.

On dreary winter afternoons, I sometimes sit by the fireplace with a warm drink in one hand and a map in the other. I find a trail on the map and follow it across green meadows, through fragrant forests, over rippling streams.  I feel a warm summer breeze touching my face as my mind calls up memories of past hikes and visions of future ones. I can hardly suppress a giggle.  I wonder what the other boys are doing.

(c) 2014 Ken Klug