Needed - a modified map of the Earth

[ffutures]

I've looked at the various options for changing the position of the Earth's axis - see previous posts - and decided that I'm going to go with a relatively small change, moving the North Pole about 15 degrees south along the 180 degree meridian, a little west and north of the Bering strait between Alaska and Siberia. This means that London is now at 35 degrees north, not 50 degrees, so hopefully enjoys a mediterranean climate (about the same as Algiers). The North Polar ice cap is probably going to end up close to or touching Siberia and Alaska, but they're used to cold weather there anyway, while the South Pole moves closer to the tip of Africa, and hopefully nothing too drastic happens to the rest of the world. It's still going to be a more or less recognizable map, just a bit distorted.

Niamey in Niger is now on the equator, I think the northern tip of Australia is too, Ecuador is now very slightly south of it, and so forth. You can visualise this to some extent as a sine wave plotted on a normal map of the Earth, with the peaks 15 degrees North of the current equator at the Greenwich Meridian, 15 degrees south at 180 degrees.

The snag is that what I will need is a map of the earth plotted with the new equator as a straight line, and the land masses shifted accordingly. I can probably fake this to some extent by distorting a normal map, but all map projections lie to some extent about the position and size of land masses near the poles, and changing their position without changing the relative sizes will make this worse. I'm not enough of a geographer to get this right. If anyone has software or the skills to do this properly, or can think of a better way to do it, I'd love to hear from you.

I'm not too sure what to do about the degree of axial tilt. 20 degrees or so seems to work well for having seasons and forming nice big ice caps, but would anyone stupid enough to do this in the first place think of that?

Comments

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

"The alternative, as you say, is to try to reverse engineer them from a standard projection but you'll lose details round the poles."

I tend to think of the poles as not really *having* details. Unless you count the penguins... =;o}

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Exactly, because they are covered with ice most of the time no one is bothered that (like Greenland on most maps) they are just a white blob. But with the shift in axis the existing poles will be significantly down and Antarcica at least will be partially ice-free. Which then raises the question about wher the actual land boundary is in that area.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

Indeed. And Antarctica is already a hotly(ironic?)-contested continent.

All we need now is for some Krynoid (http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=krynoid&hl=en&biw=1680&bih=890&prmd=ivns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=bHVlTunzGpOp8AOWnZiJCg&sqi=2&ved=0CDcQsAQ) or other to throw the cat amongst the lemmings...

=:o}