Times Atlas to reflect 'environmental disasters'

16:43 03 September 2007
NewScientist.com news service - Catherine Brahic

Climate change and unregulated irrigation projects are becoming major drivers for redrawing maps, say the cartographers of a renowned atlas.

"We can literally see environmental disasters unfolding before our eyes," says Mick Ashworth, the editor-in-chief of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World. "We have a real fear that, in the near future, famous geographical features will disappear forever."

The latest edition of the atlas is published on 3 September, four years after the previous version.

The atlas's cartographers have had to make changes to their maps because of environmental changes in the past, but "there were even more of these cases in this edition," says Jethro Lennox, publishing editor. "Rather than just one or two, you have half a dozen major examples of how human activities are causing changes in our maps."

Features that have changed over the past few decades include:

• the Aral Sea in Central Asia has shrunk by 75% since 1967 mostly because of uncontrolled irrigation

• Lake Chad in Africa has shrunk by 95% since 1963 because of a combination of failing monsoons and human overexploitation

• the Dead Sea is 25 metres lower than it was 50 years ago – like the Aral Sea, the shrinking is largely due to uncontrolled irrigation

Marsh expansion

One feature that has changed for the better is the outline of the Mesopotamian marshlands. More than 90% of the area was destroyed in the 1990s by the diversion of water for agricultural irrigation and deliberate draining ordered by Saddam Hussein in retaliation for the Marsh Arabs' uprising after the first Gulf War.

But since the end of Hussein's regime in 2003, Marsh Arabs have returned to the area and are successfully restoring the marshlands. "Now we are having to make them bigger again," Lennox told New Scientist.

For future editions, the cartographers are preparing for imminent changes. Shishmaref is an Inupiat village built on the permafrost of Alaska. It lies on a narrow island along the Bering Strait, where the melting of the permafrost and rising sea-levels threaten the very land it stands on.

As a result, some scientists believe that the 4000-year-old settlement is likely to become the first US community to have to move due to a warming climate.

Lennox says that he and his team are keeping an eye on the community in anticipation that they may have to change their future maps of the area.