Gary Gale

Running between Edgware, Mill Hill East and High Barnet to the North of London to Morden to the South, the London Underground's Northern Line stretches for 36 miles and takes in 50 stations. The line, marked in black on the Tube map, is a familiar sight to London commuters. But is the map of the line accurate? Does it reflect reality?

A geographic map of the line looks something like this. The Northern spurs of the line merge at Camden Town and then split into two branches, one via Charing Cross and the other via Bank, before merging again at Kennington and heading towards the Southern terminus at Morden.

Up until the 6th. Century BC, it was commonly held that the world we live on was flat. Then Pythagorus came along and started to prove that the world is in fact a sphere. We now know that he was almost right and our planet is really an oblate spheroid, looking not dissimilar to a slightly squashed beach ball.

Today's Internet brings us many wonderful things. Some of those are maps. Today's map shows that with a little bit of cartographical cut-and-paste and a flagrant disregard for the theory of plate tectonics, the world we live on is actually a chicken. A giant chicken.

In the closing days of 2013, Atanas Entchev, who together with Glenn Letham are the duo behind the intriguing GeoHipster, got in touch to ask me to do some crystal ball gazing and predict what's in store for the geo industry in 2014.

You can and should read all of the 10 other predictions as part of what will be HOT in geo in 2014 — predictions from the GeoHipster crowd, but here's what the geo crystal ball divulged to my gazing ...

Predictions are easy to get right. After all, look at DEC’s Ken Olsen when he said in 1977 that “there’s no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home”.