Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1944, Síða 340

300
LE NORD
fore 1900 were the work of in-
dividual cartographers, and there-
fore necessarily incomplete and un-
satisfactory, both from a scientific
and from a practical point of view:
for anything like an exhaustive sur-
vey of such a vast and trackless area
is far beyond the powers of any
single man.
Such a task can, in fact, only be
performed by an institution. In
1900 it was tackled by the Danish
General Staff. During 12 summers
between 1900 and 1914, and in the
summers of 1919 and 1920 a con-
siderable number of officers and
surveyors of the General Staff,
with a large body of assistants,
worked at the systematic survey
of the country. Some of the best
Danish experts were thus given
a chance to show what they
could do in face of a problem
which bristled with technical and
scientific difficulties. The scale
chosen was that of 1 : 50.000, which
is only slightly smaller than that
used for Danish “Atlas Sheets” in
the scale of 1 :40.000. The choice
of such a large scale proved, how-
ever, to be a mistake, for even with
a very large staff of surveyors, the
work necessarily became so difficult
and so costly that it is doubtful if
it could ever have reached comple-
tion. During the period 1905—
1915. 117 maps were produced
on this scale. They covered the
coastal districts from the South-
Eastern corner of the island,
along the Southern, Western, and
Northern coast as far as Húna-
fjörður. When work was resumed
in 1919 it was decided to substi-
tute the scale of 1 : 100.000 for the
one originally chosen. The separa-
tion of Iceland from Denmark held
up the work till 1930, but in that
year it was resumed, to be com-
pleted in 1944.
1937 saw the completion of the
survey of the whole coastal region,
but in spite of a number of im-
provements in the technique of
surveying, the prospects of com-
pleting the mapping of the whole
country were far from bright: most
of the interior highlands, which
constitute about one half of the ter-
ritory of the country, still remained
unsurveyed. In fact,the work would
not have been completed, at least
not for a long time to come, if it
had not been for the employment
of a new and highly efficient tech-
nique: that of mapping from the
air.
The advantages of this method
are however frequently overestim-
ated. The extent and cost of the
work to be performed is about the
same as with surveys on the ground.
It is true that air photography in-
volves less work in the field, and
that the actual surveying therefore
takes less time, and can be per-
formed with a smaller staff. But
this only means that the main work
is transferred from the field to the
laboratory and the workroom. The
Icelandic highlands are, however,
uninhabited and largely inacces-