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Monday, April 29, 2013

Geography Quiz 5: Geopolitics' Impact on Irrigation

I remember a television special in which Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts gang went to a space station.  Towards the end the group of kids are looking down on Earth and one states that borders do not exist on the physical globe and what a wonderful world it would be if the political geography matched the "real" geography.

The below Earth-snapshot disproves the children's version of the world.


For this quiz a) tell how it is possible for such a sharp change in agricultural lands in general terms and b) (feel free to turn on labels and zoom around) describe with details what made this change possible.

4 comments:

Twelve Mile Circle said...

Here's another stark international line if you'd like to try the quiz on a different location: http://goo.gl/maps/J6yZU

Andy Davis said...

I can only guess -- but differences in government policy and effectiveness could account for these differences. I'm at work, so I don't have time to zoom around, but I await an explanation of the larger context!

Enrico said...

Interesting snapshot. I was not aware of this difference in this part of the world.
How about adding the Haiti/Dominican Republic border as well?

Catholicgauze said...

Catholicgauze,
Thanks everyone for taking a guess. The answer for this particular case (which in turn answers the generalized first question) is that this is the border between Pakistan (left side) and India (right side). Right nearby is the Indus River. Pakistan irrigates the Indus heavily to support its agriculture but India has no access to the rive and Pakistan isn't sharing. So India's side represents the "natural" support capacity of agriculture while Pakistan's engineering shows how human innovation and expand agriculture.