Mega cities are not the only major human impact though. The atlas also estimates that 90,000 square kilometres of forest–an area the size of the British Isles–is being lost each year.
But the greatest impact to the world has come through global warming. The availability of digital satellite images, which can be compared year by year, has revealed with shocking clarity the shrinkage of ice fields and the evaporation of lakes.
“We are seeing things that you would not have seen 10 or even 15 years ago, changes that we can see by overlaying versions of our satellite images,” said Sheena Barclay, the atlas’s chief cartographer. “And we are seeing a lot of concerning things.”
The Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, once the world’s fourth largest lake, is now only the tenth largest. Since 1975, the surface of the Dead Sea has dropped by 17 metres. But perhaps the most compelling indication of global climate change (which is occuring, whether it’s caused by humans or not) became apparent during the preparation of this year’s edition of the atlas, when cartographers had to redraw the coastline of Antarctica after the Larsen ice shelf disintegrated last year.