Collection: Harold Fisk

In 1944, Harold Fisk was a geologist and cartographer working for the US Army Corps of Engineers when he made these 15 maps to illustrate the government's “Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River”.

Fisk's ingenious maps shows a different portion of the Mississippi and its various courses over time between Cape Girardeau, Missouri and Donaldsonville, Louisiana.

We see the Mississippi and the river's meander belt, which is the area of a valley bottom across which the river's channel has evolved over time. By using overlapping colours, Fisk reveals millennia of changes into a single image.