8 Why Are the Coasts So Different? How to Use Online Maps Resources to Answer Broad Geographic Questions

The other day I was standing in a friend's office at work. On his wall he had a large, beautiful, and high-resolution map of North America. Interestingly, it was black and white, which makes your eye see shapes of landforms in a different way. You don't get distracted by all the colors and annotations of the political map, or the colors of deserts, grasslands, and forests on a physical map. You just see the shape of the land itself; it's a kind of clarity of vision that removes all human traces, and you see just the shapes—the topography—pure and plain.