Skip to main content

Since "geography of Mars" literally means "the description of Earth of Mars", #TodayILearned a specific term has been created for it: Areography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areography

#TIL

#til #todayilearned
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
•

No link preview in this post because the banner image for this article is a 48.5 MB 26,674x10,670px colorized map of Mars based on Viking orbiter images. 😅

You've been warned: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/Mars_Viking_MDIM21_1km_plus_poles.jpg

Khurram Wadee
Khurram Wadee  
•
Why have they switched to the Greek name (Ares)?
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
•
@Khurram Wadee Because the Greek gods were there first? 🤷‍♂️
@Khurram Wadee
Khurram Wadee
Khurram Wadee  
•
The convention seems to be to use the Roman names and so I would expect it to be Marsography but I'm only guessing.
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
•
@Khurram Wadee What convention? This term only appeared in the latter half of the 20th century while the planet name s much more ancient, I'm not surprised they wanted to honor the original name before it was replaced by the Romans.
@Khurram Wadee
Khurram Wadee
Khurram Wadee  
•
All I'm saying is that all of the other planets are named after the Roman rather the Greek gods. That is a convention; there is no intrinsic or logical reason why they should be.
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
•
@Khurram Wadee Indeed, but the planets weren't named by the same people who had to come up with a new word for the geography of Mars, so I'm not surprised the convention changed.
@Khurram Wadee
⇧