When converted into a jigsaw puzzle, a map becomes purely decorative and a source of wonderful time-wasting. It’s refreshing that maps don’t always have to be earnest.
Map jigsaws have a magnetic hold over me. In my time I’ve given away jigsaws of chocolate-box tourist scenes (always with boring blue sky or thick trees), and great art, and baked beans - but never a map one.
5th ed. 1969, based on 1906 and 1912 surveys, Institute of Geological Sciences (now British Geological Survey).
So, looming above my computer as I work at home is one that I have a particular attachment to: it’s the Geological Map of the British Islands [sic], produced some years ago as a jigsaw by the British Geological Survey. The artist-scientists who ever designed geological maps deserve a medal: the thing is a colour riot, it makes a wonderful map and an even better jigsaw puzzle.
Britain’s rocks lend themselves well to a vast array of colours: we have everything from un-killable Pre-Cambrian stuff up in the north of Scotland and quantities of greywackes and other sharp things in the hills, via some fairly modern sheets of black lava, and two bright red sandstones of wildly different dates, as well as spreads of scarcely consolidated gunk hardly warm from the last Ice Age. This huge variety of materials has arranged itself in familiar great curving swathes and parallel blocks, interrupted rudely by drastic faults and bright heavy blobs. It could all have been designed as an eye-catching abstract painting. Colouring these on the map must have been some task: in the end it isn’t just tough old rocks being hard, dark colours, though: the outstandingly durable and ancient Lewisian gneiss is a nice pink, and the vicious Moine schists are a pale yellow. So another theory bites the dust. Great domes of granite just have to be bright red, though, and the Coal Measures a dirty grey. And the light greens do tend to stay in the soft South-East.
For sheer colour ecstasy, the geological map has probably only found a rival in those multi-coloured wonders produced in more recent years by the people who finally found out about fractal maths - including
the fabulous Mandelbrot set, that you can never get to the bottom of. It’s a bit the same with geological maps: as above, so below. The deeper you go (the larger the scale), the more stuff of the same nature comes up, so for instance the geological map of the gorgeous igneous ring complex on Ardnamurchan looks as spectacular as its national counterpart, and just as intricate, because all the boundaries are fractal.
the fabulous Mandelbrot set, that you can never get to the bottom of. It’s a bit the same with geological maps: as above, so below. The deeper you go (the larger the scale), the more stuff of the same nature comes up, so for instance the geological map of the gorgeous igneous ring complex on Ardnamurchan looks as spectacular as its national counterpart, and just as intricate, because all the boundaries are fractal.
My wife, Alice, and I both had this jigsaw when we met. So we gave the one that had no pieces missing to a charity shop. The one with a gap got put up in a clip-frame, with its ‘beauty spot’ or blemish that emphasises the completeness of the rest and makes the visitor realise the thing is a jigsaw puzzle, that you don’t normally expect to see on a wall. Having the original map on display wouldn’t be the same.
The geological map is the cartographer’s colour indulgence at its pinnacle. You could say that it has triumphantly converted science into art, and it does work excellently in conveying knowledge. But it also happens to be a visual treat. And a great piece of entertainment as part of the bargain.
By Roger Pountain, Senior Information Analyst, Collins Geo
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