Turtle Island progression sequence

[Finium]

My work on this project began with inspiration from Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness and the relative obscurity of circumpolar peoples through many of the world's great empires. That gap on the northern edge of the Mongol Empire seemed to beg for extrapolation. The essential concept is a pole-oriented civilization which, like hostile climate zones in real life, maintains its prestige and wealth through transporting goods across otherwise impassible terrain. This also gave me the interesting opportunity to use a pole-centered map as the default projection, in this case azimuthal. This required some generous interpretations on my part for physical features which make the seas less passable, the continental glaciers more accessible, as well as imparting knowledge of coal mining to an otherwise unindustrialized community.

It began, in image #1, with a sketch drawn on the bus home from work and lays out the essential pieces. A northern hemisphere divided into two large landmasses that have been joined together by a recent glaciation. Through this ice sheet, a mountain range allows access to the top of the glacier as well as providing an isolated source of natural coal for the transcontinental traders. From this ink sketch I created baby's first raster in image #2 with a basic set of climate ranges and a more refined shape. After the second image in the sequence, I took a long break while learning to use inkscape with many other projects, but returned this year to bring the concept into greater clarity.

An unfortunate problem I experienced with the raster set was that it was already as I had imagined it--in a pole-centric projection--but was really just guesswork on my part. In order to take advantage of the many opportunities of g.projector, I needed to great an acceptable import image. This was equirectangular image #3 which I drew without direct reference from the original, but tried to keep the same basic organization of landmasses present as well as adding more detail to the coast lines. Image #4 is the result of turning the previous raster into an azimuthal projection using g.projector and tracing the coastline again in inkscape yielding the basis for future maps. In #5 you can see my wilbur-fu at work, which I created using a basic outline of the mountains you can see in the original sketch. This I used to draw my major river basins although it will probably not be used for future topography work.

Finally you can see the result in #6 a very broad map of the northern hemisphere complete with major rivers, the Ten Cities, and the polar ice cap. You can see a higher resolution version of #6 here and a better version of the process image by clicking on it. I'm currently working on this project alone, so I welcome all forms of commentary and criticism!