Misplaced Pages

#734265

24-470: A globe shows details of its subject. A terrestrial globe shows landmasses and water bodies . It might show nations and major cities and the network of latitude and longitude lines . Some have raised relief to show mountains and other large landforms. A celestial globe shows notable stars, and may also show positions of other prominent astronomical objects. Typically, it will also divide the celestial sphere into constellations . The word globe comes from

48-481: A map projection that inevitably introduces an increasing amount of distortion the larger the area that the map shows. A globe is the only representation of the Earth that does not distort either the shape or the size of large features – land masses, bodies of water, etc. The Earth's circumference is quite close to 40 million metres. Many globes are made with a circumference of one metre, so they are models of

72-896: A globe took place before the fifteenth century. The earliest extant terrestrial globe was made in 1492 by Martin Behaim (1459–1537) with help from the painter Georg Glockendon. Behaim was a German mapmaker, navigator, and merchant. Working in Nuremberg , Germany, he called his globe the "Nürnberg Terrestrial Globe." It is now known as the Erdapfel . Before constructing the globe, Behaim had traveled extensively. He sojourned in Lisbon from 1480, developing commercial interests and mingling with explorers and scientists. He began to construct his globe after his return to Nürnberg in 1490. China made many mapping advancements such as sophisticated land surveys and

96-819: A surviving celestial globe is part of a Hellenistic sculpture, called the Farnese Atlas , surviving in a 2nd-century AD Roman copy in the Naples Archaeological Museum , Italy. Early terrestrial globes depicting the entirety of the Old World were constructed in the Islamic world . During the Middle Ages in Christian Europe, while there are writings alluding to the idea that the earth was spherical, no known attempts at making

120-407: A three dimensional raised relief globe with a 64 cm (25 in) diameter (equivalent to a 200 cm circumference, or approximately a scale of 1:20 million) showing the highest mountains as over 2.5 cm (1 in) tall, which is about 57 times higher than the correct scale of Mount Everest . Most modern globes are also imprinted with parallels and meridians , so that one can tell

144-435: Is a large region or area of land that is in one piece and not noticeably broken up by oceans . The term is often used to refer to lands surrounded by an ocean or sea , such as a continent or a large island . In the field of geology , a landmass is a defined section of continental crust extending above sea level . Continents are often thought of as distinct landmasses and may include any islands that are part of

168-607: Is believed to date from 1504. It may be the oldest globe to show the New World . Stefaan Missine, who analyzed the globe for the Washington Map Society journal Portolan , said it was "part of an important European collection for decades." After a year of research in which he consulted many experts, Missine concluded the Hunt–Lenox Globe was a copper cast of the egg globe. A facsimile globe showing America

192-478: Is required to make the paper map fit the sphere. This method of globe making was illustrated in 1802 in an engraving in The English Encyclopedia by George Kearsley. Modern globes are often made from thermoplastic . Flat, plastic disks are printed with a distorted map of one of the Earth's hemispheres . This is placed in a machine which molds the disk into a hemispherical shape. The hemisphere

216-531: Is united with its opposite counterpart to form a complete globe. Usually a globe is mounted so that its rotation axis is 23.5° (0.41 rad ) from vertical, which is the angle the Earth's rotation axis deviates from perpendicular to the plane of its orbit. This mounting makes it easy to visualize how seasons change. In the 1800s small pocket globes (less than 3 inches) were status symbols for gentlemen and educational toys for rich children. Sorted in decreasing sizes: Landmass A landmass , or land mass ,

240-544: The Terra Australis that had been posited as a hypothetical southern continent. In the context of archaeology and world history , the term "Old World" includes those parts of the world which were in (indirect) cultural contact from the Bronze Age onwards, resulting in the parallel development of the early civilizations , mostly in the temperate zone between roughly the 45th and 25th parallels north, in

264-556: The Americas are sometimes defined as two separate continents while mainland Australia is sometimes defined as an island as well as a continent. Nevertheless, for the purposes of this list, mainland Australia along with the other major landmasses have been listed as continental landmasses for comparison. The figures are approximations and are for the four major continental landmasses only. The artificial Panama and Suez canals are disregarded, as they are not natural waters that separate

SECTION 10

#1732765415735

288-519: The Latin word globus , meaning " sphere ". Globes have a long history. The first known mention of a globe is from Strabo , describing the Globe of Crates from about 150 BC. The oldest surviving terrestrial globe is the Erdapfel , made by Martin Behaim in 1492. The oldest surviving celestial globe sits atop the Farnese Atlas , carved in the 2nd century Roman Empire . Flat maps are created using

312-530: The TMA version of the Soyuz spacecraft replaced this instrument with a digital map . Traditionally, globes were manufactured by gluing a printed paper map onto a sphere, often made from wood. The most common type has long, thin gores (strips) of paper that narrow to a point at the poles, small disks cover over the inevitable irregularities at these points. The more gores there are, the less stretching and crumpling

336-491: The Earth at a scale of 1:40 million. In imperial units, many globes are made with a diameter of one  foot (about 30 cm), yielding a circumference of 3.14 feet (about 96 cm) and a scale of 1:42 million. Globes are also made in many other sizes. Some globes have surface texture showing topography or bathymetry . In these, elevations and depressions are purposely exaggerated, as they otherwise would be hardly visible. For example, one manufacturer produces

360-459: The Earth from different orientations to help counter the north-up bias caused by conventional map presentation. Celestial globes show the apparent positions of the stars in the sky. They omit the Sun, Moon and planets because the positions of these bodies vary relative to those of the stars, but the ecliptic , along which the Sun moves, is indicated. In their most basic form celestial globes represent

384-669: The Europeans as comprising the entire world, with the " New World ", a term for the newly encountered lands of the Western Hemisphere , particularly the Americas. While located closer to Afro-Eurasia within the Eastern Hemisphere, Australia is considered neither an Old World nor a New World land, since it was only discovered by the Europeans later. Both Australia and Antarctica were associated instead with

408-471: The approximate coordinates of a specific location. Globes may also show the boundaries of countries and their names. Many terrestrial globes have one celestial feature marked on them: a diagram called the analemma , which shows the apparent motion of the Sun in the sky during a year. Globes generally show north at the top, but many globes allow the axis to be swiveled so that southern portions can be viewed conveniently. This capability also permits exploring

432-822: The area of the Mediterranean , including North Africa . It also included Mesopotamia , the Persian plateau , the Indian subcontinent , China , and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa . These regions were connected via the Silk Road trade route, and they had a pronounced Iron Age period following the Bronze Age. In cultural terms, the Iron Age was accompanied by the so-called Axial Age , referring to cultural, philosophical and religious developments eventually leading to

456-407: The associated continental shelf . When multiple continents form a single contiguous land connection, the connected continents may be viewed as a single landmass. Earth 's largest landmasses are (starting with largest): Continental landmasses are not usually classified as islands despite being completely surrounded by water. However, because the definition of continent varies between geographers,

480-474: The continents. 126 countries 7 de facto states 22 countries French Guiana Old World The " Old World " ( Latin : Mundus Vetus ) is a term for Afro-Eurasia coined by Europeans after 1493, when they became aware of the existence of the Americas . It is used to contrast the continents of Africa , Europe , and Asia in the Eastern Hemisphere , previously thought of by

504-548: The emergence of the historical Western ( Hellenism , " classical "), Near Eastern ( Zoroastrian and Abrahamic ) and Far Eastern ( Hinduism , Buddhism , Jainism , Sikhism , Confucianism , Taoism ) cultural spheres . The mainland of Afro-Eurasia (excluding islands or island groups such as the British Isles , Japan , Sri Lanka , Madagascar and the Malay Archipelago ) has been referred to as

SECTION 20

#1732765415735

528-584: The invention of the magnetic compass. However, no record of terrestrial globes in China exists until a globe was introduced by the Persian astronomer, Jamal ad-Din , in 1276. Another early globe, the Hunt–Lenox Globe , ca. 1510, is thought to be the source of the phrase Hic Sunt Dracones , or " Here be dragons ". A similar grapefruit -sized globe made from two halves of an ostrich egg was found in 2012 and

552-522: The stars as if the viewer were looking down upon the sky as a globe that surrounds the earth. The sphericity of the Earth was established by Greek astronomy in the 3rd century BC, and the earliest terrestrial globe appeared from that period. The earliest known example is the one constructed by Crates of Mallus in Cilicia (now Çukurova in modern-day Turkey), in the mid-2nd century BC. No terrestrial globes from Antiquity have survived. An example of

576-680: Was made by Martin Waldseemüller in 1507. Another "remarkably modern-looking" terrestrial globe of the Earth was constructed by Taqi al-Din at the Constantinople observatory of Taqi ad-Din during the 1570s. The world's first seamless celestial globe was built by Mughal scientists under the patronage of Jahangir . Globus IMP , electro-mechanical devices including five-inch globes have been used in Soviet and Russian spacecraft from 1961 to 2002 as navigation instruments. In 2001,

#734265