Damian’s Websurf on Swiss Topography
Since my return to Switzerland earlier this year, my wife and I have been traveling extensively throughout my home country visiting major landmarks, many Unesco World Heritage sites (http://whc.unesco.org/en/statesparties/ch) as well as riding on some amazing funiculars and gondolas (http://www.titlis.ch/en/glacier/rotair) to the highest peaks of the Swiss alps. It becomes apparent very quickly how much Switzerland is dominated by mountains, broad valleys, steep ravines and waterways of all shapes and sizes. The terrain alters in altitude hugely across the landscape wherever you go.
The Swiss realised very early on the importance of creating maps that not only showed the towns, cities and travel routes but depicted the change in elevation as well as the incline of hills and mountain passes. To this day, maps for hiking and traveling published by the Swiss Topographical Institute (www.swisstopo.ch) are regarded as some of the best in the world. In our world today of satellite navigation, Google Earth (https://www.google.com/earth/) and GPS make it is easy to forget how cumbersome and time intense it must have been to create accurate maps of Switzerland from ground level.
The first standardized volume of Swiss maps was created under the guidance of General Guillaume-Henri Dufour (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume-Henri_Dufour) in 1838 using a system of Triangulation. The highest mountain in Switzerland, the Dufourspitze, is named after him.
From set points in the landscape surveyors would measure the length of two sides of a triangle and the angle between and could therefore with simple arithmetic calculate the resulting volume and distances of the land (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulation). Importantly, Dufour not only used this system for the plane but also to establish the vertical elevation. This allowed for the creation of a square grid across Switzerland in which each point could be accurately displayed both in longitude and latitude as well as the height above sea level, which was measured from a rock in Lake Geneva called Pierre du Niton (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_du_Niton). Interestingly, the design for this grid system relied on the fact that it would use only positive numbers on all axis which means that the point 0/0 for all Swiss maps is located in a vineyard in Bordeaux (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweizer_Landeskoordinaten).
With the advent of airplanes, Switzerland was one of the first country to conduct aerial landscape photography (called Photogrammetry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photogrammetry) which increased the precision and quality of maps hugely, particularly in urban environments where sight on ground level can be obscured by buildings. Since 1926 the Helvetic Confederation has been mapped from above which brought with it a whole new set of challenges, a flight report from 7th August 1928 states: “Taking precise photos is proving difficult as due to the strong wind gusts, I frequently have to hold on to the airplane very tightly, sometimes almost forgetting to take pictures”. To celebrate the centenary of the Swiss Air Force (http://www.air14.ch/internet/air14/en/home.html) SwissTopo has launched a new application.
LUBIS
In April 2014 the Federal Office of Topography (http://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/internet/swisstopo/en/home.html) enhanced their LUBIS Viewer — Luftbild Informations System — (http://map.lubis.admin.ch/?lang=en) which now contains over 320'000 aerial photos of Switzerland spanning 100 years. Try it out for yourself and see how your hometown has developed over the last century. You can also discover how the Swiss landscape has changed with the introduction of motorways in 1964 (http://www.srf.ch/player/tv/srf-wissen/video/einweihung-der-ersten-schweizer-autobahn-a1?id=a5b77257-a647-4fac-bc9b-524ac1764507) and urban expansion. The images are arranged in strips across the map and can be viewed either by location or along the timeline. The application works online from any computer or tablet and offers an intuitive interface for you to explore Switzerland for hours.
You can also take part in an online game with historic aerial photos called SwissGuesser (http://storymaps.geo.admin.ch/storymaps/storymap10/?lang=en) to see how well you can recognise parts of Switzerland.
