Lab 9 East and Southeast Asia

Lab 9 East and SE Asia EEZ and Piracy

This week we discussed East and Southeast Asia.  This area contains the world's most populous country and the most populous metropolitan area.  This region has experienced internal disparities and has an ever-changing landscape.  These two regions share a common economic and political history.  Asia's largest river, the Yangtze, flows through central China and economic activity that surround the river accounts for one fifth of the country's GDP.  In 2003, the Chinese government built the Three Gorges Dam, and it is the world's largest hydroelectric power station.  This dam greatly changed the local landscape, displaced millions of people, and submerged an ancient city.  Humans settled the area at least 80,000 years ago, and around 10,000 years ago several cultural groups emerged during the New Stone Age.  Around 6500 BCE, humans along the Yangtze first domesticated rice.  Indonesia, Malaysia, and the other islands of the region were a single landmass know as Sunda.  Northern China was vulnerable to invasion, so a series of walls were built making up The Great Wall of China. Angkor Wat, in Cambodia was built in the 12th century and is the world's largest cultural center.  Several countries in this region rank high on an index of corruption.

This week's lab discussed the tensions in the region with China encroaching on other countries nautical territories or EEZ.  The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea established an EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) from the base line (shoreline) to 200NM offshore for each country and states that any resources in those waters (fisheries, natural resources, etc) belong to that country.  A buffer analysis in GIS creates a defined zone around a geographic feature, in the case of our map it shows the country's EEZ's.  China's claim violates Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei EEZ's.
Heat map symbology displays the relative density of points as a dynamic raster visualization using a color scheme to indicate density values. Our map uses this to look at instances of piracy in the South China Sea. There are more instances of piracy outside of the South China Sea especially around the narrow straights between Indonesia and Singapore which bottlenecks the shipping lane and makes easier targets.  Possibly not much in South China Sea because of Chinese military presence and conflict in the area.  

 

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