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National Geographic : 1964 Apr
Contents
two names, among the oldest and newest on the continent. Cape Canaveral, sighted by Ponce de Leon in 1513 when he claimed Florida for Spain, was named by later Spanish explorers for the canelike reeds that grew there 400 years ago. Last fall President Lyndon B. Johnson changed the name of the rocket-studded sandspit to Cape Kennedy. The townsite on the Cape, however, retains the historic Span ish name, following its residents' wishes. Natural Trenches Form Huge Reservoirs North America, the third largest continent after Asia and Africa, abounds in natural su perlatives, as the new 11-color Atlas Map clearly shows. From Arctic edge to Yucatan flatlands, for example, rolls the world's larg est plain. A splash of blue in the center delin eates this planet's largest fresh-water lake Superior. In Arizona lies its greatest gorge the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, which could comfortably hold 100 Great Salt Lakes. In another spectacular Western chasm (pages 558-9), water is already backing up behind Glen Canyon Dam, near the Utah Arizona border-part of the massive Colo rado River Storage Project. When full, man made Lake Powell will hold a two-year flow of the Colorado in rock-walled depths that could easily submerge the Washington Mon ument. In addition to creating a great new wilderness playground, the project will send hydroelectric power surging into five neigh boring states. A tangled mesh of major highways spreads across the map's midsection, including the route taken by NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC'S Ralph Gray between Guaymas, Mexico, and Mount Robson in British Columbia (his ac count begins on page 542). Bolder red lines trace continuing conquests of the road build ers: the Alaska, Trans-Canada, and Pan American Highways. Even now surveyors are forging the final overland link between North and South America through dense jungle from Panama into Colombia. The scale of the 19-by-25-inch Atlas chart, including portions of the U.S.S.R., Norway, and Brazil, permits an inset detailing the Aleutian Islands and the Bering Sea. Here, too, one can read man's mark upon the continent. North America was first peopled by nomads who crossed from Asia perhaps 30,000 years ago. Through shallow Bering Strait, daring U. S. submarines of the nuclear age have pioneered a possible under sea trade route beneath Arctic ice. A century ago historian Francis Parkman wrote of North America: "A boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep; river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling with the sky." Today's map makers must put the "boundless vision" into bounds. How to transpose this segment of the globe to flat paper with least distortion and scale error? The time-honored Mercator projection depicts the world as a flattened cylinder, with Unearthing a Viking home, explorer Helge Ingstad finds in Newfoundland first conclu sive proof that Norsemen reached and set tled the New World a thousand years ago. polar areas stretched out as wide as the Equa tor. Though invaluable to navigators, a Mer cator map of this region shows Greenland twice the size of South America; actually it is only slightly larger than Mexico. National Geographic cartographers solved no fewer than 690 problems in spherical trig onometry to draw this Atlas Plate on the Chamberlin Trimetric Projection, devised in 1946 by the Society's Cartographic Engineer Wellman Chamberlin. The result: On North America, Greenland's true area is exaggerated by less than 31/2 percent. THE END 591
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