Lady Anne Blunt in Northern Arabia

In March the Library of Congress posted a series of maps for Women's History Month on their geography and map blog. Their last post was a map showing the journeys of Lady Anne Blunt through northern Arabia.

Blunt was a British noblewoman who was famous for helping to save the purebred Arabian horse by buying and bringing horses to England. She was the first European woman to cross the Arabian desert in pursuit of these horses. As an interesting side note her mother, Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace is often regarded as the first computer programmer.

Blunt was not a cartographer but her place-specific descriptions of two journeys, in 1878 and 1879, allowed Edward Stanford, a London bookseller and mapmaker (creator of Stanfords Travel Guides) to create this remarkably detailed map.  It shows not just the physical geography of the land, but cultural features such as irrigation and grazing practices, tribal relations and pilgrimage routes.

Here are a couple more zoomed in views.

You can browse and/or download the entire map online at the Library of Congress.

The Perils of Ancient and Modern Travel

An ongoing series of articles in National Geographic detail Paul Salopek's walk to trace the spread of humans throughout the world. In the most recent installment, he walks across the Hejaz of western Saudi Arabia, visiting ancient wells - the blue symbols on the map.

These wells were located a days walk away so that travelers would be able to traverse the desert region. Knowing the location of the wells was a matter of life and death.

And now for something completely different - a ridiculous comparison!

Today's electric car pioneers face a similar difficulty. Routes must be carefully planned around the location of charging stations. A recent article in the Mercury News details the first cross country trip in a Tesla by John Glenney. The article includes this map of their charging stations.

Tesla has a network of charging stations located close enough (about 265 miles per charge) to be able to travel certain routes across the USA. During Glenney's trip the Hagerstown, Maryland facility was not ready. He had a stressful trip from Newark, Delaware to Somerset in western Pennsylvania, arriving with only 11 miles left on his charge.

As the Tesla network expands, trip planning will gradually become less important as it has in Saudi Arabia, where drivers can find bottled water at gas stations. The wells now sit abandoned as traffic rushes past and planes fly overhead.

Map of the Week-Filling Empty Space

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is being built on an empty desert landscape around the village of Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. They have put together this interactive map (takes a minute or two to load) as a recruiting tool. In their own words:
"Just launched this month, the map offers students, faculty, research partners and community members the opportunity to explore the university via an immersive and cutting edge digital map, highlighting everything from residential flats, lab and research facilities, sustainability features, community services, recreational facilities, flyover video and more.
Currently the interactive map's main purpose is that of a recruiting tool, something which differentiates it from virtually every other campus map. Rather than showing students how to get from point A to point B, however, the map serves to share the KAUST story with them. Also, KAUST is using the map to showcase its commitment to sustainability by highlighting the green aspects of every building."

The map allows you to switch between the plans for the university and an aerial view (left) and is "the only physical link to an entire institution which does not yet exist."




This empty piece of desert is rapidly being transformed as this recent photo shows.

Soon it will look like this:

Thanks to Jason Hellman of Fleishman-Hillard for the above comments.