Robin Williams

How did he work this out looking at maps?

So such a practical thing that you don't think about in terms of why measure measurements.

what's going on in terms of coastlines and movement of earth and water and so on.

And it really is worthwhile looking at that story in the book itself to get the full ramifications of how Charles Darwin created history.

Now, I don't suppose he went to escarpments like we've got terribly close to where we're sitting at the moment on the south coast of New South Wales.

where if you go to the escarpment, you can see also remnants of fossil reefs halfway up a mountain.

Anyway, the next story belongs to somebody called Wilkins.

I first read about him travelling under the ice of Antarctica in a submarine, which sounded amazing.

But he was a mapper, and looking at mapping an area that's all white

and you can't actually see where the kilometre of ice stops and the land takes over.

So how did he do that?

How did he pioneer the work?

Even if it's under a kilometre of ice.

Tricky, yes.

Third, we have Marie.

Marie Farp.

And she reminds me of some of those mysterious pictures you see occasionally, and you reproduce them in the book, of the ocean's floor with the water taken out and all that ribbing going up and a dividing line down the middle.

And on such a gigantic scale, she used sound to work out that sort of picture, didn't she?

Three stories so far, one to go.

although you've got plenty more in your book showing how these maps looking at the world as a complete operating piece of nature is changing how human beings developed on so many levels and the final example gives that graphically in a really startling way when terry hughes from the northern part of queensland went out to map the ways in which bleaching was taking place