Natural Geography

Overview

This project is a bit of a hodgepodge of related projects and isn’t really an end in itself. I like to make a number of historical maps, especially in Europe. Historical borders usually follow natural boundaries, like rivers or mountains. To help facilitate the creation of these maps, I thought it would be both fun and useful to make shape files of Europe’s rivers and the impassable parts of the Alps. In addition to Europe, I’ve started a shape file for rivers in the US, mostly for a future project in which I imagine a hypothetical US with borders developed by natural boundaries rather than latitude and longitude lines.

There’s not much to do with this project, other than continue adding rivers and/or mountains to the existing shape files. As I work on the shape files, I’ll include an updated map in the accompanying blog post. For now, I’ll post an “original” map for what the rivers looked like when I made this page.

US rivers are at the top and European rivers are at the bottom right. Can you spot the outlines of countries or states, based on the rivers?

Relevant Blog Posts

Distractions and Routines

It’s going to take some time for me to develop a routine with writing posts. I usually want to wait until I’m done working for the day to write, but sometimes that’s way too late at night (like yesterday). As I move into the fall semester of school, I’ll figure out whether mornings or evenings…