Thoughts - My Projects and Very, Very, Very Small Islands
Mankin Island - Marplot Map (1:4,000,000)
For the past 6-hours I have been digitizing various layers that makeup Mankin Island. I have been working off of a Google Earth / Digital Globe image so I have great resolution of ground features from which to work. So for 6-hours I am intently focused on this chunk of island floating in the Pacific. I took the 13-layers of digitized information from Google Earth, reformatted the files so they would drop into Marplot, my current mapping software and imported it. My map view at the time was at 1:4,000,000 scale. I looked for the imported files on the screen and couldn't find them. I could recognize many countries, islands and other geographic features, but not my project island. Then it hit me, "Damn, these islands I am working on are small!". They are tiny relative to the expanse of the ocean they reside in. They are drips and drops of land compared to large islands.
What's the point? Yeah, they are small, but to the people living on them they are HOME! They are the universe for a few hundred hardy souls that have lived on these isolated outposts of humanity from birth to death.
This is Mankin Island up close and personal. The image includes the airstrip and the taro gardens. Reefs ring the island. To the southwest of the airstrip is one of the villages that are located on these motus. I am in the process of mapping this little jewel. Before I am finished I will probably spend another 6-hours working. It is time well spent.
Enjoy!
Labels: atoll, Global Mapper, Google Earth, island, Marplot
This is just a test of Haloscan and comments
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Anonymous |
1/06/2007 06:24:00 AM