Project o4: Sense of Place (Topography)

Distribution of hills and major development projects on or above the 75m contour in Penang Island

Topography is the study of Earth's surface shape and features or those of planets, moons, and asteroids. It is also the description of such surface shapes and features (especially their depiction in maps).

The topography of an area can also mean the surface shape and features themselves.

In a broader sense, topography is concerned with local detail in general, including not only relief but also vegetative and human-made features, and even local history and culture. This meaning is less common in America, where topographic maps with elevation contours have made "topography" synonymous with relief. The older sense of topography as the study of place still has currency in Europe.

For the purposes of this article, topography specifically involves the recording of relief or terrain, the three-dimensional quality of the surface, and the identification of specific landforms. This is also known as geomorphometry. In modern usage, this involves generation of elevation data in electronic form. It is often considered to include the graphic representation of the landform on a map by a variety of techniques, including contour lines, Hypsometric tints, and relief shading.

USM is located around the flat land around the seaside. We can observed it from the map of the Penang. For its contour, it is below 75 m from sea level.

For the topography of Lake Aman, we can conclude that the land is flat and suitable for agriculture activities and housing area since the contours of the map have no large difference ( maintain around 10-25m from sea level).Of course, that is one of the reason that I choose the site around Lake Aman.