USA MAP OF PHYSICAL FEATURES

Similar latitudes revealed in the overlay indicate similar vegetation.

USA

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Directions | HABs, hazardous algal blooms | migrations | Hurricane Coast | The Americas in 1797 | land use | two regions | U.S.

Welcome to the home page of this satellite image map of the United States' topographic patterns. While browsing, you will find connections to other images or maps of use to you in these courses: Environmental History, Conservation or classes about the ecological conditions of the county.

Any map is an approximation of the whole, a viewpoint or perspective, and thus it becomes a geographical model.

See a more detailed Map of the US




Historical land use patterns in the US have been influenced by this land system.

Since the Land Ordinance of 1785, areas of the nation seized from Native peoples and newly acquired lands from England, France, Spain, Canada, or Mexico were surveyed using the above grid pattern. Originally recommended by Thomas Jefferson as a rational means of surveying newly acquired territories, the Township and Range system can be found on deeds today. In those parts of the country, such as Florida, Texas or California and Oregon where these regular rectangles are not used the land had been surveyed and granted by the sovereigns of the Empires or countries from which the new territories were acquired.

Directions | HABs, hazardous algal blooms | migrations | Hurricane Coast | The Americas in 1797 | land use | two regions | U.S.

Directions | Coastal population 2000 | migrations | Hurricane Coast | The Americas in 1797 | land use | two regions | U.S.

historic depopulation of the interior 1990s

The America's after the French Revolution's historic impact.

Directions | HABs, hazardous algal blooms | migrations | Hurricane Coast | The Americas in 1797 | land use | two regions | U.S.

Storms come in many shapes but two tropical cyclones are shown below on this satellite image and they help us to define the hurricane prone regions of the Caribbean and Pacific regions North America.

Directions | HABs, hazardous algal blooms | migrations | Hurricane Coast | The Americas in 1797 | land use | two regions | U.S.

The line dawn vertically on the map below is the 100th meridian, that is a line 100 degrees west of the Prime Meridian that bisects London through the district of Greenwich, hence the name the Greenwich meridian. The one hundredth meridian divides the most eastern areas of the US from the arid regions of the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and the far western frontier to the Pacific Coast.

Arid western regions | humid (more rainfall) east.

Directions | HABs, hazardous algal blooms | migrations | Hurricane Coast | The Americas in 1797 | land use | two regions | U.S.

North

WestEast

South

Directions | HABs, hazardous algal blooms | migrations | Hurricane Coast | The Americas in 1797 | land use | two regions | U.S.

American landscape art | Landscape index | Sense of Place | American artists