Sea Travel And The Grid Street Pattern

This posting will later be moved to the world and economics blog, www.markmeekeconomics.blogspot.com .

If you wonder what sea travel has to do with the grid pattern of streets that is seen in many cities and towns, read on.

Have you ever wondered how sea travel affects the way things are done on land? I had an interesting thought recently that I have never seen anywhere else.

Sea travel almost always consists of the boat moving in a straight line from one port to another. It is usually a matter of setting the boat in one compass direction, and then continuing from there. Right angles generally do not occur in nature, the major exception being that the surface of the earth forms a two-dimensional surface, at least from our local perspective, with four cardinal compass directions. Direction at sea can be determined with a magnetic compass, although use of the stars is more accurate because the magnetic north and south poles are not exactly the same as the geographic poles.

Travel on land is historically much less in straight lines than at sea. The local terrain is far more of a factor in travel on land than at sea.

Square or rectangular is usually the most efficient shape for a building, although this is not as important when it comes to street patterns. As we saw in "Social Engineering", on the world and economics blog, use of the grid pattern in the streets improves the spatial efficiency of buildings, relative to non-grid street patterns, but makes it so that one has to travel a further distance to get from one point to another unless the destination is on the same street as the starting point.

Pre-planning is necessary to set up a town or city with a grid street pattern. But towns historically have just grown, rather than having been planned, and then have merged together. Local terrain and pre-existing routes or roads are far more important factors in how a town's street pattern will turn out.

My hypothesis is that humans would never have thought of setting out streets in a grid pattern if not for extensive travel at sea. The grid pattern of streets is generally believed to have begun with the Romans. But the Roman Empire was centered around the Mediterranean Sea, Mare Nostrum means "our sea" in Latin. Ships full of grain from Egypt would set a straight-line course for the opposite side of the Mediterranean.

The city of Gloucester, in England, for one example originated in Roman times (as does any town in England with a name ending in -caster, -cester or, -chester). The city was originally built around four streets in the compass directions, Northgate, Southgate, Eastgate and, Westgate Streets. It can be seen in the satellite imagery that those streets still remain, and there is a grid pattern to the streets along the docks on the Severn River. But, other than that, the grid pattern was abandoned as the city grew during the Middle Ages.

Even after Europe began the Age of Discovery by ship, the grid pattern of streets remains rare in Europe. But North American towns and cities are overwhelmingly built around the grid pattern. How is it that the Europeans who settled North America came from a continent where the grid pattern of streets is very much the exception, rather than the rule, but yet they built almost exclusively in this apparently foreign pattern after crossing the ocean by ship?

The only logical answer is that it was the long journey in a straight line by ship, guided by the compass or stars, that planted the idea of setting out the streets in their destination in straight lines by the compass directions.

The Soil Depth Dynamic

This posting will later be moved to the meteorology and biology blog, www.markmeeklife.blogspot.com .

Have you ever noticed that it never rains consistently on large areas of sand or rock, anywhere in the world? I see these as what we could call primitive landscapes which have not developed due to lack of rain.

In the posting on the meteorology and biology blog, "The Bone To Flesh Ratio", I explained my conclusion of how living things on land, with skeletons of bone, must get progressively smaller over time simply because the atoms in flesh are returned to circulation in the biosphere much faster than the atoms in bone when a creature dies. This means that, as time goes on, there must be a greater and greater amount of potential flesh available, relative to bone.

I would now like to announce a similar mechanism involving plants, and the depth of the soil in which they grow.

Plants began with those that can live on bare rock, such as mosses and lichens although they are not technically plants. The first, smallest and most primitive plants gradually break down the surface of the rock, by the intrusion of their roots, into soil so that later and bigger plants can grow into it. These, in turn, break the rock down a little bit further so that it can accommodate still larger future plants.

This process continues, the roots of the largest plants grow to fill the space available to them and then increase it a little bit further by the intrusion of their roots to break down more rock into soil. This means that the average plant, unlike the average creature with a skeleton of bone, must necessarily get larger as time goes on due to the increasing availability of deeper soil. Animals and birds spread plants around by eating the fruit with seeds, and passing the seeds through their digestive systems (for example, see "Pterosaurs And Tropical Islands", on the meteorology and biology blog). Some plant seeds are also distributed by wind.

Trees, the largest plants, were a very long time in coming. The deep soil in many places today is the result of the root action of thousands upon thousands of generations of trees, in breaking down the rock gradually with their roots.

The critical factor in the development of soil from rock is the availability of water. This determines the depth and nature of the soil in various regions. Israel, for example, is mostly dry and one of Jesus' parables involved soil that is not very deep. What about the difference between the Australian Outback and the east coast, on the other side of the Great Dividing Range? The east coast gets far more precipitation, and so the soil is much further developed because of the roots of the endless generations of plants that have flourished there.

But there is a complicating factor, the nutrients that are essential to plants can get lost when the soil gets deep. In areas of the world where glaciers reach during the ice ages, moving glacial ice acts to "plow" the soil and bring nutrients back to closer to the surface. We saw how essential this is in the posting "Glaciers And Nutrients", on the meteorology and biology blog. This development of soil in each locality is modified by the fact that glacial movement carries soil from one place to another. Britain is wet, and must have once had deeper soil, until some of it was scraped away by glaciers.

It is true that most of the structure of a plant is carbon that was pulled from carbon dioxide in the air. A leaf uses the energy of the sun to split the carbon dioxide molecule. The two oxygen atoms that were in the CO2 molecule are released back into the air and the carbon atom is retained for the plant's structure. But the soil also includes vital nutrients that were taken out, and then put back in upon death and decay, by past generations of plants.

The summary of this perspective is that the size of the average plant will gradually increase, over very long periods of time due to increasing depth of soil, and then decline due to loss of nutrients in the deep soil, in a way similar to creatures based on a skeleton of bone as described in "The Bone To Flesh Ratio". Tropical soils may have already passed the peak and entered the depletion stage, while the depletion stage is postponed in temperate areas due to the "plowing" of the soil by ice age glaciers.