This map of the country of Mongolia was featured on the wall of Mongo's Mongolian Barbeque restaurant* in Quito, Ecuador. It is rendered in cowhide, with colored bits of leather doing all the decoration and adornment. It's really a pretty impressive work of art: cartographically accurate (with some omissions due to space constraints close to Ulaanbaatar), but also beautiful. It did not have a key or legend with it, but blue blobs represent lakes (like these). Yellow areas appear to represent high-elevation areas. Off-white appears to represent steppe, though the distribution shown on this map is not exactly how I would have drawn it. Brown circles are "major" cities, while blue circles represent villages. Of particular note to me was that my Peace Corps site, the itty-bitty village of Ereentsav, is located on the map, probably because it's a border-crossing town with Siberia. It's one of the two little blue dots in the northeast (upper right) of the map. Google Maps can show you the town's location on the Siberian border, though they spell its name differently ("Ereencav"):



Incredibly, the satellite photos for this region of the world are good enough that you can zoom in and see the house I lived in when I served there. See the green building in the middle? I lived in the little shed (half as wide as the green building, a little longer) just to its right (east). My outhouse is even visible -- the little square nubbin in the southern corner of the fenced-in area:



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* "Mongolian Barbeque" is a branch of Inner Mongolian cuisine. Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region in China, with decent food. "Outer" Mongolia is the country of Mongolia, its own nation, distinct from China. I served there in the Peace Corps in 1998-1999, and I can tell you from experience that they do not serve especially good food. Maybe that's being too harsh... Let's just say that in Mongolia, you don't eat Mongolian Barbeque.

Labels: art, ecuador, maps, mongolia

In 1998-1999, I served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Mongolia. A "News Focus" article in the February 1 issue of Science explores how climate change is affecting Mongolia. The author, John Bohannon, notes that "Winter temperatures in Mongolia have increased a staggering 3.6 degrees C on average during the past 60 years." That's a lot more warming locally than the global average. Areas of permafrost are melting, turning solid ground to mush. This yields forests of trees tipped over at drunken angles. Might sound okay -- after all, Mongolia's really cold, and not so good for agriculture. But at the same time, "Four of the worst drought years on record in Mongolia occurred in the past decade," and they've had several extremely harsh winter storms (called zud) which have killed off huge numbers of livestock and precipitated near-famine conditions in some regions. As Bohannon notes, "the livestock losses spurred a wave of suicides
among herders." Because I have a personal history in Mongolia, news like this affects me in a way other than as a pure scientist. In fact, I'd have to say I look at climate change through two totally different lenses: (1) as a scientist, I think it's fascinating to see it all the changes that the Earth system is experiencing in this interesting time, but (2) as a citizen of human society, I'm rather worried about it all. And when it hits folks like the good people of Mongolia like it is, it really drives home that humans need their environment. As Will Durant glibly put it, "civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice."

Reference:

Bohannon, John (1 February 2008). "The Big Thaw Reaches Mongolia's Pristine North." Science 319 (5863), 567. DOI: 10.1126/science.319.5863.567

Labels: global warming, mongolia