Heartlands Theory map

Date: 1904

Creator: Sir Halford John Mackinder (1861 - 1947)

• First published in the 1904 article, The Geographical Pivot of History.

• Foundational idea in geopolitics: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.”
• Geopolitical mapping linking politics to territorial control published ever since. Contemporary resonance; e.g. Barnett’s Pentagon’s New Map.
  

Pollen Analysis Diagrams

Date: 1934

Creator: Sir Harry Godwin (1901 - 1985)

• Technique for quantitative analysis of changes in vegetation developed by van Post in Sweden in early 1900s.
• Popularized in Britain following Godwin’s 1934 publications of two part article, Pollen Analysis: An Outline of the Problems and Potentialities of the Method (New Phytologist, Vol. 33, No. 5, pp. 325-358).
• Diagrammatic expression of technique exploited by Godwin and other researchers in East Anglia, led to the successful explanation for environmental changes in the Holocene and pioneering of other rigorous dating methodologies.

Godwin-inspired pollen analysis diagram.

(Source: http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/midewin/pollendiag.html)

Drainage basin as sediment transfer system

Date: 1977

Creator: Stanley A. Schumm

• Published in Schumm’s 1977 research monograph The Fluvial System, this simple heuristic model stresses the relations between form and process in fluvial systems.
• Frequently used in teaching it comes to represent the turn towards process that dominates much contemporary geomorphology.
  

(Source: Newson M. (1992) Land Water and Development. London: Routledge.)

'Hockey sticks' global warming graph

Date: 1998

Creator: Michael E. Mann and co-workers

• Published in an influential 1998 Nature article, Mann et al, Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing Over the Past Six Centuries.
• Visualization of implied anthropogenic induced global warming provoked significant controversy and frequent reworkings of both data series and its representation, for example in the Third IPCC report.
  

(Source: Brumfiel G, (2006) "Academy affirms hockey-stick graph", Nature 441, 1032-33.)

ITE Land Cover Map of Britain

Date: 1993

Creators: Robin Fuller and co-workers

(Source: http://www.ceh.ac.uk/products/publications/documents/23global2.pdf)

• Pioneering digital processing of LANDSAT TM satellite imagery to produce a useful 25 class land cover map of Britain. Described in 1994 research article by Fuller et al, The Land Cover Map of Great Britain: An Automated Classification of Landsat Thematic Mapper Data in the journal Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing.
• The work has had significant impacts across discipline, offering one of first automated processes of land cover database compilation.
  

The Shrinking World
Date: 1939
Creator: Eugene Staley

(Sources: Image from Schäfer W. (2005) “Ptolemy's Revenge: A Critique of Historical Cartography,” Coordinates. Online Journal of the Map and Geography Round Table, American Library Association.)

• Illustration in Staley’s 1939 monograph World Economy in Transition.
• Perhaps the first visual representation of the impact of technical progress on global travel time.
• Shrinking world concept popularised in the literature of globalization, for example in books such as Peter Dicken’s Global Shift and as an illustration of time-space compression by David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity.
  

(Source: Harvey D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell p. 241, plate 3.1.)

Maps Descriptive of London Poverty

Date: 1886-1903

Creator: Charles Booth (1840-1916)

(Source: Charles Booth online archive, http://booth.lse.ac.uk.)

• Original publication associated with Booths's Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London.

• Strongly influential on the study of geographies of inequality. Key start point for much thematic mapping, census cartography and descriptive analysis of social geography; e.g. CASA's London Profiler.
  

Booth-influenced London Profiler, 2008.