![]() He first proposed the idea of sea grant colleges, as a balance to the land grant charters that characterize many American state universities, the concept that underlies the Sea Grant Programs that train students and support programs in ocean science to this day. Spilhaus, who died in 1998, had a fascinating mind and career. ![]() In 1936, Athelstan Frederick Spilhaus, a South African geophysicist and oceanographer, immigrated to the United States, and Joined the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts where he developed the bathythermograph, a tool enabling measurement of ocean depths and temperatures from a moving vessels, a breakthrough in ocean science and in submarine warfare. It has proved a difficult argument, one reason being that is hard to visualize. As a new paradigm for survival in the 21st century, I have been promoting the idea of “hydraulic society,” a world organized around the value of the ocean, our living in “hydrospace” where water and all its integrated nurturing elements must be the core of our future values, structures, and behaviors, the focus around which we invent and prioritize actions for the future. Visualization, then, is a powerful tool for understanding, beyond data, that enables transformative perspection and opens our minds and conventions to question. ![]() We suddenly saw ourselves, not as a balance of power, but as an entirety of Nature. It was both an exhilarating and humbling worldview, that fostered, partially, a sense of stewardship of something so precious and not to be corrupted or destroyed. That world view was challenged when, in 1972, a photograph of Earth from space, taken by the Apollo 17 space mission, revealed our planet as fragile entity in a cosmic ocean, a “blue marble,” mostly water, protected by a wafer-thin layer of atmosphere, itself vulnerable, primarily from anthropomorphic action from within. On the surface, it appears a balanced view, a terrestrial equilibrium, that affirms land mass as its focus, surrounded by an indifferent sea. We have been schooled to visualize and understand our global arrangement by maps and projections, specifically the Mercator projection that aligns the hemispheres, west and east, in a relationship that has informed our relations, conflicts, and cultures as apposite, often opposite. How do we change the way we see the world? The Spilhaus World Ocean Map, a projection of earth centered on Antarctica, makes the ocean the focus of an astonishing worldview, pushing the land to the outer edges of the square and re-organizing our global geography around the true natural systems of the world ocean. Visualization is a powerful tool for understanding, opening our minds and enabling transformative change through a new way of seeing. Centered in Antarctica, the world oceans come together to form a singular, connected, contiguous body of water. (Note that geodist does not accept sf-format objects the sf package itself should be used for that.) Note that The mapbox cheap ruler algorithm is intended to provide approximate yet very fast distance calculations within small areas (typically the size of single cities or study sites).The Spilhaus Projection World Ocean Map was developed in 1942 by Dr. Distance measures currently implemented are Haversine, Vincenty (spherical), the very fast mapbox cheap ruler (see their blog post), and the “reference” implementation of Karney (2013), as implemented in the package sf. ![]() All outputs are distances in metres, calculated with a variety of spherical and elliptical distance measures.
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