OXFORD
ATLAS OF THE
WORLD TWENTIETH EDITION 2013 448 pp. • 11 x 14-3/8 inches • $89.95 (02) • 978-0-19-932846-8
T
he only world atlas updated annually, guaranteeing that users will find the most current geographic information, Oxford’s Atlas of the World is the most authoritative atlas on the market. Full of crisp, clear cartography of urban areas and virtually uninhabited landscapes around the globe, the Atlas of the World is filled with maps of cities and regions at carefully selected scales that give a striking view of the Earth’s surface. Opening with world statistics and a colorful, instructive 48-page Introduction to World Geography; beautifully illustrated with tables and graphs; this acclaimed resource provides details on numerous topics of geographic significance such as climate change, food and water supply, biodiversity, energy, global conflict, and landforms. This milestone 20th edition includes a new six-page opening section on The Future of The Oceans, a new spread on food production as part of the Will the World Run Out of Food? opening section, six new thematic maps on such fascinating topics as the direction of oil trade and refugee remittances, and seven new satellite images, including the Panama Canal and Rio de Janeiro. Country descriptions have been updated to reflect the latest developments around the world, and existing maps now depict dozens more man-made and natural features, such as the Santa Maria volcano in Guatemala and a major new container port in Brazil. New inset maps of Hainan province in China and the United Arab Emirates (colored for political boundaries) offer expanded coverage of these regions.
ATLAS OF THE WORLD THROUGH THE YEARS Since the first edition in 1992, the Atlas of the World has seen many improvements throughout its twenty editions. The biggest change has been the steady digitization of all the map content. Since the first edition premiered it has been effectively recompiled and has gone from an entirely film-based atlas, manually revised, to a fully digital product. Here are some highlights of the changes to the Atlas of the World throughout the years: 1992 –1st Edition
The Atlas of the World starts at only 400 pages long. The locator maps are in black and white.
1996 –4th Edition Color is added to the contents and map locators. The first eight digitally produced maps of Europe are included. 1997 –5th Edition Hong Kong is returned to China, and this is reflected in the atlas. 1998 –6th Edition World maps increased by 16 pages. New maps of Alaska, Greenland, Hawaii, and the Southeast United States are added, and marks the first use of mapping from the European digital database. 2000 –8th Edition The first use of satellite imagery is used. The images are called “stunning” by Library Journal. 2001–9th Edition The 32-page World Gazetteer appears for the first time. Baghdad was added to the 67 maps of major cities around the world. 2002 –10th Edition Czechoslovakia is revised and shown split into Czech and Slovak Republics. 2003 –11th Edition The Geographical Gazetteer is added. 2004 –12th Edition Interstate and state highways are shown throughout North America, putting the overall precision and clarity of the book well ahead of the competition. 2006 –13th Edition The cities of Orlando, Florida, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Montreal, Quebec are added to the atlas, for a total of 70 major metropolitan areas. 2010 –17th Edition The six-page Will The World Run Out of Food section is introduced as a major feature. 2012 –19th Edition The new country of South Sudan shown for the first time. New U.S. census figures used to update the mapping. 2013 –20th Edition Seven new satellite images of London, Amsterdam, Riyadh, Cairo, Vancouver, Sydney, Panama Canal, and Rio de Janeiro are added.
What’s New
The 20th edition of the Atlas of the World has been completely updated and revised. Changes include: • Fully revised index & refreshed satellite imagery • Revised frontmatter country and city statistics • Seven new satellite images of London, Amsterdam, Riyadh, Cairo, Vancouver, Sydney, Panama Canal, and Rio de Janeiro • Six new world thematic maps on water scarcity, immigration, refugees, refugee remittances, direction of oil trade, and globalization • Expansion of Hong Kong approach map to include Lan Tau Island and International Airport
Additions Include: • Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta • New motorway link, Croke Park, and Aviva Stadium in Dublin • New E-W metro link in Mumbai • Santa Maria volcano in Guatemala • Regional name Queen Elizabeth Land in Antarctica • Latest administrative boundaries in Greenland • Motorways under construction in Ireland • New national park Calanques, near Marseilles • High speed rail link between Karlsruhe and Offenburg in Germany • New motorways in Ukraine and Russia • Principal national parks in Russia • Unclaimed territory between Egypt and Sudan • Inset map of Hainan
68 THE UNIVERSE For more information: 70 Orbits of the planets Planetary data
LIFE OF A STAR For most of its existence, a star produces energy by the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium at its core. The duration of this hydrogenburning period – known as the main sequence – depends on the star’s mass; the greater the mass, the higher the core temperatures and the sooner the star’s supply of hydrogen is exhausted. Dim, dwarf stars consume their hydrogen slowly, eking it out over billions of years. The Sun, like other stars of its mass, should spend about 10 billion years on the main sequence; since it was formed less than 5 billion years ago, it still has half its life left. Once all of a star’s core hydrogen has been fused into helium, nuclear activity moves outward into layers of unconsumed hydrogen. For a time, energy production sharply increases: the star grows hotter and expands enormously, turning into a so-called red giant. Its energy output will increase a thousandfold, and it will swell to a hundred times its former diameter. After a few hundred million years, helium in the core will become sufficiently compressed to initiate a new cycle of nuclear fusion: from helium to carbon. The star will contract somewhat, before beginning its last expansion, in the Sun’s case engulfing the Earth and perhaps Mars. In this bloated condition, the Sun’s outer layers will break off into space, leaving a tiny inner core, mainly of carbon, that shrinks progressively under its own gravity. The white dwarf star thus formed can attain a density more than 10,000 times that of normal matter, with crushing surface gravity to match. Gradually, the nuclear fires will die down, and the Sun will reach its terminal stage: a black dwarf, emitting insignificant amounts of energy. Black holes However, stars more massive than the Sun may undergo a different transformation. The additional mass allows gravitational collapse to continue indefinitely: eventually, all the star’s remaining matter shrinks to a point, and its density approaches infinity – a state that will not permit even subatomic structures to survive. The star has become a black hole: an anomalous “singularity” in the fabric of space and time. Although vast coruscations of radiation will be emitted by any matter falling into its grasp, the singularity itself has an escape velocity that exceeds the speed of light, and nothing can ever be released from it. Within the boundaries of the black hole, the laws of physics are suspended.
A
bout 13.7 billion years ago, time and space began with the most colossal explosion in cosmic history: the so-called Big Bang that is believed to have initiated the Universe. According to current theory, in the first millionth of a second of its existence it expanded from a dimensionless point of infinite mass and density into a fireball about the size of our present Solar System – and it has been expanding ever since. It took about 300,000 years for the primal fireball to cool enough for atoms to form. They were mostly hydrogen which is still the most abundant material in the Universe. The radiation from this era still pervades the Universe, though its subsequent expansion means that we see it at about 3º above
absolute zero instead of its original 3,000ºC. Observations of this faint background glow reveal slight fluctuations. It is these which appear to have become, over the next billion years or so, the large-scale structures in the present Universe. As well as the matter which we can see, there is evidence of a much greater quantity of dark matter whose nature remains unknown. Within knots of this dark matter, the first stars and galaxies formed, probably within the first billion years of the life of the Universe. Our own Galaxy was among them. There were several generations of stars, each feeding on the wreckage of its extinct predecessors as well as the original galactic gas swirls. With each new generation, pro-
GALACTIC STRUCTURES
gressively larger atoms were forged in stellar furnaces, and the Galaxy’s range of elements, once restricted to hydrogen and helium, grew larger. About 9 billion years after the Big Bang, a star formed on the outskirts of our Galaxy with enough matter left over to create a retinue of planets. Nearly 5 billion years after that, human beings evolved. The Sun is one of more than 100 billion stars in the Home Galaxy alone. Our Galaxy, in turn, forms part of a local group consisting of approximately 30 similar structures, mostly small “dwarf” galaxies but a few large ones, and one – the Andromeda Galaxy – larger than our own. There are at least 100 billion galaxies in the Universe, many of which are members of huge galaxy clusters.
THE HOME GALAXY The Sun and its planets are located in one of the spiral arms of the Galaxy, about 26,000 light-years from the galactic center and orbiting around it in a period of about 220 million years. The center is invisible from the Earth, masked by vast, light-absorbing clouds of interstellar dust. The Galaxy is probably around 12 billion years old and, like other
Bulge
spiral galaxies, has three distinct regions. The central bulge is about 30,000 light-years in diameter. The disk in which the Sun is located is not much more than 1,000 light-years thick, but approximately 100,000 light-years from end to end. Around the Galaxy is the halo, a spherical zone 300,000 light-years across, studded with globular star clusters and sprinkled with individual suns.
Globular clusters
Disk
Solar System
THE END OF THE UNIVERSE
Many of the Universe’s 100 billion galaxies show clear structural patterns, originally classified by the American astronomer Edwin Hubble in 1925. Spiral galaxies like our own have a central, almost spherical bulge and a surrounding disk composed of spiral arms. Barred spirals have a central bar of stars across the nucleus, with spiral arms trailing from the ends of the bar. Elliptical galaxies have a more uniform appearance, ranging from a flattened disk to a near sphere.
The likely fate of the Universe is disputed. Accorging to one theory (top of diagram, below), the expansion begun at the time of the Big Bang will continue “indefinitely,” with aging galaxies moving further and further apart in an immense, dark graveyard. Alternatively, gravity may overcome the expansion (bottom of diagram). Galaxies will fall back together until
everything is again concentrated at a single point, followed by a new Big Bang and a new expansion, in an endlessly repeated cycle. The first theory is supported by the amount of visible matter in the Universe; the second theory assumes that there is enough dark material in the Universe to bring about the gravitational collapse.
Many of the nearest stars, like Alpha Centauri A and B, are double stars, orbiting about their common center of gravity and to all intents and purposes equidistant from Earth. Many of them are dim objects, with no name other than the designation given to them by the astronomers who first investigated them.
However, they include Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, and Procyon, the seventh brightest. Both are larger than the Sun; of the nearest stars, only Epsilon Eridani is similar in size and luminosity. Most of the other bright stars in the sky are within 500 light-years of the Sun – a small fraction of the diameter of our Galaxy.
� M51, the Whirlpool Nebula, comprises the large spiral galaxy NGC 5194 and its smaller, barred companion NGC 5195. M51 was the first astronomical object in which a spiral structure was identified, in 1845. Although smaller and less massive than our own Galaxy, M51 is much brighter, due to recent star formation.
Most galaxies, however, have no obvious structure at all. Galaxies also vary enormously in size, from dwarf galaxies only 2,000 light-years across to great assemblies of stars 80 or more times larger.
THE NEAREST STARS The 22 nearest stars, excluding the Sun, with their distance from Earth in light-years* Proxima Centauri Alpha Centauri A Alpha Centauri B Barnard’s Star Wolf 359 Lalande 21185 Sirius A Sirius B
4.2 4.4 4.4 5.9 7.8 8.3 8.6 8.6
UV Ceti A UV Ceti B Ross 154 Ross 248 Epsilon Eridani HD 217987 Ross 128 L789-6
8.7 8.7 9.7 10.3 10.5 10.7 10.9 11.2
61 Cygni A Procyon A Procyon B 61 Cygni B HD 173740 HD 173739
11.4 11.4 11.4 11.4 11.5 11.7
* A light-year is about 5,900 billion miles [9,500 billion km]
COPYRIGHT PHILIP’S
Praise for Previous Editions
“ The Oxford Atlas guarantees endless hours of contented browsing.” —Entertainment Weekly “Resting the large, heavy volume in my lap and inhaling the ink from its coated pages offers sensuous escapism of a high order.” —The New York Times “A page-turning stroll through the continents.” —USA Today “You can’t do better than the Atlas of the World.” —Chicago Tribune “This authoritative volume is the standard by which others will be measured. —Boston Herald “Breathtaking.” —School Library Journal
OXFORD
ATLAS OF THE
WORLD The benchmark by which all other atlases are measured Key Features
• The only atlas to be updated annually • Fascinating features including world statistics tables, in-depth opening sections on Will the World Run Out of Food and The Future of the Oceans, an Introduction to World Geography, and an A-Z Gazetteer of Nations • Stunning satellite imagery and sophisticated digital mapping • Well-designed interior for heightened accuracy and easy locating • Sophisticated digital mapping showing detailed political and topographical information with exceptional brightness and clarity • Comprehensive index with thousands of historical names, geographical features, and cities with full latitude and longitude coordinates
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