Too Tidy

I got distracted.
There is a morbid fascination in looking at north America on Google Earth, not just because of the disturbing resemblance to seventies wallpaper, but for the implications a change to the landscape on this scale must have. This is part of the square called Cheyene and an inset zoom in on one square of irrigated land in the neighbouring square of Sherman I think. The first time I zoomed in on the middle of the US I thought it was an anomaly produced by the mozaic of photos, but there really are vast areas divided up into square parcels of land with a lot of them containing circles formed by irrigation booms. I get the sense that you could slip in a few microscopic images of integrated circuits and nobody would notice the difference. It is fascinating how much detail there is and how damned tidily the whole lot has been divided up. If you are prone to panic attacks you might want to have a brown paper bag on hand before you start to contemplate too deeply how quickly this has happened and what this may mean for southern america and its status as the "lungs" of the earth. Better yet have a half a glass of something soothing before you start and that may give you enough ballast to keep an even keel. Thankfully a lot of the planet is still a little blurry in the pictures. If you don't have Google Earth on your machine give it a try, and let the old mind boggle a bit.