So geographers, in Afric maps, With savage pictures fill their gaps.
Jonathan Swift
The project, which took three and a half years and $600,000, began with black-and-white negatives of satellite images dating back to 1987. In dogeared envelopes at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration library in Maryland, Van Sant eventually found a virtually cloudless picture of every four-square-kilometer parcel of land and sea. He then took the digital tapes of each photo and, working with NASA systems engineer Lloyd Van Warren, fed them into a $200,000 graphics computer. On one side of the monitor’s split screen, Van Sant displayed a strip of the planet 1,000 miles wide running from pole to pole; on the other, he called up photo after satellite photo of tiny parts of the strip, substituting one at a time into it until he had a cloudless mosaic formed of 37,324,800 pixels. To match up the borders of the various parcels, he used equal parts software and artistic judgment - but no sea monsters. He then transferred the map to a seven-foot-tall fiberglass globe that he calls GeoSphere.
Through a nonprofit venture called Eyes on Earth, Van Sant will sell permutations of GeoSphere, including posters. For schools, Van Sant plans to market globes fitted with plastic overlying hemispheres showing such data as political boundaries or crop distribution. Animated software versions could show how pollution travels or how forest cover has changed. Databases of sea surface temperatures, winds, species habitats, energy production and other information could be fed into computer representations of GeoSphere to show where whale migrations meet oil spills, for instance, or how ocean currents relate to fisheries. That would prove an invaluable research tool and usher in what Van Sant calls “a revolution in how we see.”
