the.com/topography
The art of describing lumps so precisely nobody gets lost on them.
means The detailed mapping or description of the physical features of a place — its hills, valleys, rivers, and contours.
from From Greek topos (place) plus graphia (writing/description) — the same graphia that gives us photography and biography. Originally it meant writing about a specific place, like a local chronicle, before it narrowed to the surveyor's art of charting the actual shape of the land.
- origin
- Greek for place-writing, literally
- contour lines
- each one marks constant elevation, never crossing
- not geology
- describes shape, not what it is made of
- mars has it
- topographic maps exist for other planets too