Beijing
Atitlan
Balkan Parts
Centering on the lower Danube with its feathery tributaries, this palette was designed to isolate the tallest hills while staying fairly quiet and a bit on the sad side. Low seashores are made indistinct, and the gray tones are surprisingly readable in distinguishing the degree of local dissection. This is a topographically complex part of… Read more »
Around Tibet
Tibet is by far the planet’s largest mountain feature, and affects winds and seasons, deserts and rivers, people and metaphysics. The great rivers of Huang Ho, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Tsangpo-Brahmaputra, Ganges, Indus, and Amu Dar’ya all rise from its slopes, and support well over half of the world’s population. Shrinking glaciers render the critical… Read more »
Caribees
The three dominant islands of the Caribbean are very different. Cuba’s eastern two-thirds is modest in its variety of terrain, but both Jamaica and Hispanola are rifted and surprisingly complex, with abrupt basins and limestone plateaus. The larger pair have shore terrace systems near their eastern ends, which hints at onslaughts from the sea, perhaps… Read more »
Edge of a Continent
This early Earthpattern treatment of the US’s Mid-Atlantic region used cool colors to offset graphically a beige highlighting – this in turn made contrasts within the Allegheny Plateau with its lightning bolt valley incisions, and the ridge and valley folded hills of the more southeasterly highlands. Dark grays near the seashore suppress the lines of… Read more »
Cape Bathurst
This peninsula is among the farthest north of Canada’s mainland, and in another era seemed to be scoured and smoothed on its right side by active sea ice. This had prevented the mid-sized Horton River from entering the ocean until near the tip of the peninsula. In more recent conditions the river has broken through… Read more »
Lac a l’Eau Claire
This view is within or near to the spawning ground for North America’s cyclical continental glaciations. At the top is Hudson Bay (north is right), and the curvy Belcher Islands are actually sea bottom which has risen up due to the un-weighting of the ice mass. The circular shore is straddled by prominent moraines, from… Read more »