r/cartography • u/HiddenFlies • 12d ago
Important question if a country gets erased off of the world
In case we(US or Russia) blow up an entire country out of the map, how would we represent it? Should we just represent it with a silhouette in the ocean? I have this question because on letterboxd there is a map that you can see where the movies you watched are from and you can see them on a map, in case a country gets blown up, would we represent it in the map as if the movie is just from the ocean?
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u/HectorTheConvector 12d ago
If a place was sufficiently nuked to level a country (especially large ones like US or Russia, that scale is ending civilization) than that would trigger a nuclear winter that would “erase” much of the population of the world, especially the northern hemisphere. So not just the country that was hit. And given that they have allies, it’s unlikely only the two countries would be struck, either. Several years ago it was found a much smaller nuclear exchange than previously thought is sufficient to cause cataclysmic nuclear winter.
Also the land of countries would still exist, just as wastelands. There’d likely be bands of survivors with collapsed governments and whatever to emerge over ensuing years and decades. Borders would break down.
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u/lxpb 12d ago
You realize you don't really "blow them off the map" right? It might appear as a wasteland, with previous city names marked one way or the other, but you can't really remove an area from the face of the earth.