This post will stay on the the topic of imaginary islands, but the island in question is different in two ways from those I’ve shared so far. First, not only is this island made up, but its components are too; it isn’t an idealization of a place I’ve visited or an aggregate of multiple real places. And second, I created it during the period when I was transitioning from oil to watercolor and hadn’t yet begun working with the fractured style in the latter, so it consists of a series of separate images rather than a single composition combining multiple views. But as you’ll see, in one sense it represents a worldview more than anything else I’ve created to date.
I invented Shark Fin Island for a competition in the LA+ Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture (out of UPenn), calling for entrants to design their own islands. The narrative (italicized) and images below should be self-explanatory, but to summarize, Shark Fin is perfectly situated at the confluence of multiple biogeographic realms, and the island’s steep topography creates climatic conditions enabling species from each of them to coexist in an area of less than a square kilometer (the maximum size allowed by the competition brief).
Shark Fin Island, named for its distinctive profile rising dramatically out of the mid-North Atlantic at the latitude of Nova Scotia, is the heavily-eroded product (along with surrounding seamounts) of a volcanic hotspot. Straddling climatic and biogeographic boundaries, sufficiently isolated to boast 95% plant endemism, ecologically diverse despite covering slightly less than a square kilometer, and essentially free from human impacts, many consider it to be the planet’s most unique assemblage of plants and ecosystems.
The warm waters of the Gulf Stream extend the subtropical zone northward to Shark Fin Island. This, combined with its location midway between North America and Europe, situates the island at the convergence of the Nearctic (northern New World), Palearctic (northern Old World), and Neotropical (tropical New World) Realms, each contributing evolutionary raw material transported by birds. Furthermore a striking precipitation gradient, produced by steep topography that intercepts the prevailing westerlies, has enabled colonization by plant species from a variety of climates. The lowland forest, receiving 1200mm of rainfall annually at sea level, is dominated by species with origins in Bermuda, along with contributions from subtropical North America. The montane forest, with an annual rainfall of up to 2100mm, resembles the cloud forests of the Azores and is composed primarily of species originating there (with additions from Europe, temperate North America, and Caribbean cloud forests).
Isolation, topography and a paucity of edible fauna have protected the island from exploration, settlement, and invasive species; today, access is restricted to researchers. But its environment, created by a delicate balance of topographic, oceanic and atmospheric factors, is highly vulnerable to climate change. Overall precipitation is predicted to decrease, resulting in eventual disappearance of the already restricted montane forest, along with significant impacts at lower elevations. Accelerated efforts are underway to catalogue the island’s biota while it remains intact.
A few shots of a 3D model that I ended up not developing further for the competition, but it was useful as a starting point for the drawings below.
Plan, Shark Fin Island, watercolor-on-paper original (22”x22”) with digital overlay.
Cross-section (location marked in red on the Plan above), watercolor-on-paper original (13”x22”) with digital overlay.
I should emphasize that the idea of a subtropical island at the latitude of Nova Scotia isn’t at all fantastical given that it’s also the latitude of northern Spain. What seems unlikely is such an island existing as far west as I’ve located it, because no islands exist in that region to define the climatic boundary between temperate North America and Gulf Stream-moderated Europe. (Whether the latter is technically temperate or subtropical depends on how you define the terms.) But I’ve always wondered where that sweet spot is—just easterly enough to be strongly influenced by the Gulf Stream but still close enough to northern North America to be surprising. (Bermuda, in line with the Carolinas, could be considered the equivalent for a tropical island, though that “tropical” designation is borderline.)
Watercolor-on-paper original (14”x22),” with view location shown in red on the key plan in the upper left. Note that the plants in the description are invented as well.
Watercolor-on-paper original (14”x22)”.
As I’ve explained before, a primary motivation behind the worldviews is imparting a sense of control or omniscience over a place—like the empowering feeling of taking in the sweeping vista from a mountaintop—by merging multiple facets of that place into a single experience. All of the locales I depict are “world-shrinking” like this to varying degrees, but so far Shark Fin Island is the only one to draw in influences across a scale anything approaching the entire world. Merging elements of far-flung places into close proximity is something I’d like to investigate further though. That means representing Shark Fin Island in the fractured style at some point, but also depicting real places (islands or otherwise) where this type of integration happens.
In fact such places are common. Continent- or planet-scale transitions are never completely smooth—variety in local conditions means that at a finer-grain, these gradients are in fact made up of discrete, intermingling “patches” of contrasting environments. Enlarging small segments of a gradient reveals often-sharp boundaries between these patches, though zooming back out on a map or traveling along the gradient by car (or of course by plane) they disappear into a blur. I’ve visited a few good examples of such boundary zones, including the Big Thicket in southeast Texas, where elements of northeastern temperate forests, southeastern subtropical forests, and western deserts are juxtaposed; and Lamington National Park in Queensland, Australia with relict patches of southern temperate species isolated within subtropical rainforest.
A worldview depicting a boundary zone like this would ideally include its larger transitional context as well. I do find larger-scale gradients exciting in their own right if they can be experienced in an unbroken journey on the ground. Maybe it’s by virtue of the very fact that such transitions over hundreds or thousands of miles can actually be traveled in days rather than months, “world-shrinking” by compressing time rather than space (seeing it by air is exciting too, but you of course sacrifice depth of experience for additional speed).
Darren