The United States looks like a checkerboard from above because of Thomas Jefferson. There is a type of shark that is small enough to hold in your hand. ![]() Some elephants respond to the rumba, but not the tango. It’s possible to run a computer on water droplets.Ī leap second means 80 extra wing flaps for a hummingbird. The New Horizons spacecraft was going so fast that it passed the moon in just nine hours. Thanks for joining us this summer as we wandered into the deep sea, visited Pluto, barbecued steak on lava, read the world’s oldest message in a bottle and took the first bite of space salad.Īlong with exploring why sometimes the big toe is not the biggest, we learned that: Today his grid covers much of the country, and it is still used to survey federal lands - an idea that shaped the physical landscape of half a continent. Jefferson's idea became a reality in 1785 when it was enacted as the Public Land Survey System. He proposed to slice the young United States into gridded plots of land that would support his ideal country of “yeoman farmers” who would form the backbone of American democracy. That approach doesn’t scale very well, and Jefferson, an ambitious politician who would become president about two decades later, was made chairman of a committee to find an alternative. above ground, located on the Takotna Highway about 1/4 mile southeasterly from its intersection with the left bank of Kuskokwim River…” The original colonies were surveyed using the British system of “metes and bounds,” with parcels delineated using local geography and cataloged with riveting language: As the United States expanded westward, the country needed a systematic way to divide its newly acquired lands. ![]() The idea behind this sprawling checkerboard emerged after the Revolutionary War. Thin gray and white streets trace the squares, often signaling where one property ends and another begins. The account's curator, who prefers to remain anonymous, uses Google Earth to find interesting blocks across the country.įorests, the boundaries of small towns, and farmer’s center-pivot irrigation systems all submit to the grid’s relentless logic. The images here, taken from the Instagram account show just a few of the landscapes that can be squeezed into the one-mile squares. The cells of that grid, each one mile to a side, are the visible result of a land planning system first proposed by Thomas Jefferson more than two centuries ago. Looking from the window seat on a long plane flight, you might have noticed that large swaths of the United States are divided into a latticework of farms, towns and forests.
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