I’ve always loved maps, and when I was subjected to a high school geography class I was aghast. It still seems that geography is taught as if it were some subset of economics (a not a very good one at that!). Instead of learning about the wonders of the world, students were impelled to learn and be tested upon such arcane things as knowing what the major export of Ghana is.
Especially in this modern age where anyone with a computer can have access to this information (CIA world fact book)where all of the things that you might be tested on are at your fingertips, the whole notion of reducing geography down to arbitrary memorization of easily obtainable facts always struck me as wrongheaded.
For me, maps have always been a source of wonder and quite a lot of time-wasting but harmless daydreaming. There are so many interesting stories which are related to the obscurities you can find on maps. A good example of this would be to look for a couple of islands, one at the top, and the other near the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
At the top is the island Novaya Zemlya (in Russian, ‘new land’). This island is actually so far to the extreme north that it is in the Arctic Ocean. This forbiddingly cold land has been inhabited by a population of about 100 very hardy souls (of Inuit descent). The Russians knew about this island in the 11th century and by the 15th century there was a flurry of discoverers looking for a possible northern passage over the top of Russia who found it (even Hudson and Barents were there…).
Even so, little of much real impact had ever taken place there. Novaya Zemlya has one specific point where it gained some notoriety (at least in some sectors of the western defense analyst community) when in late 1961 the Soviets tested the ‘Tsar Bomba’ just before the nuclear test ban treaty took effect. This ‘bomb’ was the largest yield nuclear explosion ever set off in the nuclear age. It had a 50-55 megaton (MT) yield… The Tsar Bomba was capable of a much larger yield (over 100MT) but for the sake of the test, I guess they throttled it back (insert irony here!).
At the far southern end of the Atlantic lies a small island owned by Norway. Bouvet Island (called Bouvetoya in Russian and Norwegian). It is considered to be the most remote island on the earth. It is just a large rock shield covered by a glacier; it has no bays to reasonable means to land. There is a long suffering Norwegian weather research station there (I couldn’t even imagine what you would have to have done to warrant being sent here!).
The interesting part of the story is that takes place not on the island but allegedly in the nearby sea… On September 22, 1979 there was a double flash recorded at this position on the globe by a satellite. A double flash is an identifying characteristic for a nuclear blast. This was called the Vela Incident, and even now, there are no answers as to what really took place. Some say that it could be the arbitrary result of the satellite receiving a meteor hit, others have presumed that it was a nuclear test…but by whom? This site is close enough to South Africa, and they did have a nuclear weapons project going on at the time; others suspect that it could have been: France, India, or even Israel. I’ve always found that is a bit strange to have something like this with no huge flock of conspiracy buffs following it… It seems that the real mysteries are not interesting enough…
Maybe that is why I have always loved maps…
