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From Vespucci to GIS

The "spilling-out" represented by Vespucci was not of artistic achievement but of an approach to the investigation of the Earth. It was concerned, as was all exploration at the time, primarily with the Earth's form, of how the world looked: its capes and bays, its human and natural resources. The exploration effort to which Vespucci contributed was a painfully slow process, and it was not until the 19 Century that the process was in any sense complete. Today satellites can complete the same process in hours. Vespucci's contribution lay in his ability to reason from limited observation to a synoptic view: to scale up to the conclusion that the coast he explored formed a new instance of the class "continent", of which three instances were known in the old world. He made other scientific contributions: to the estimation of the Equatorial radius and to the estimation of longitude, both synoptic concepts. The process of mapping never ends, of course, and today we are still concerned with filling gaps in our knowledge of the subsurface, of changes that constantly occur, and of the details missed by earlier efforts. The process of personal (re)discovery, through tourism and communication, also never ends. Much more important than knowledge of form, however, is knowledge of process, of how the world works as a system. Vespucci and his contemporaries knew and learned very little about process, but as mapping has improved so has our collective effort to understand and ultimately to predict change. It is possible to reason from form to process, from the footprints that processes leave, and there are many classic examples in science. But ultimately form cannot confirm process, it can only falsify inappropriate hypotheses. Geographic information systems, a development of the past 40 years, have vastly improved our ability to examine the Earth, integrating knowledge of many kinds into a single computational environment, examining patterns and detecting anomalies, and building and testing models of process. As such they provide an essential link between the observational sciences pioneered by Vespucci, and the knowledge of process that will be essential as humanity struggles to sustain life on this vulnerable planet.