28 August 2015
North is Not Up, Nor is South Down
Posted by John Freeland
I can’t count the number times I’ve heard a TV weather person make a statement akin to “this line of thunderstorms will pass below New York by Thursday afternoon.”
Yes, and while it’ll be sunny up top on the street, if you’re working all day in the subway, or on underground utilities, you’ll need an umbrella. Be prepared to seek safety in daylight as those storms may produce lightning and damaging winds.
One day, years ago, while teaching a high school ecology class in New Hampshire, a student pointed to the large shaded relief map of North America hanging on the front wall. He walked up closer and pointed to the St. Lawrence River, which flows northeast past the Gaspe peninsula to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and asked, “How can that river flow uphill like that?”
I found out later this confusion over “up” vs. “north” involving this very same river was a common problem dating back over a century, as wrote Amos W. Farnham of the State Normal School in Oswego New York advising aspiring teachers in Chapter XXI, American Education, volume 8 (1904) and who “nails it” thusly:
Don’t use “up” for north, nor “down” for south. “Down” is with the pull of gravity and ends at the center of the earth. “Up” is opposite to the pull of gravity and ends at infinity. The directions “up” and “down” are parallel with the earth’s radii, and, therefore, cannot be used for the cardinal directions “north” and “south.”
This confusion of terms results from the use of “wall” maps, which for the accommodation of the class, are presented in a vertical plane, with this instruction: “north” is toward the top of the map, and “south” is towards the bottom.
Don’t teach geography without the aid of the sand tray. The sand tray, pictures, blackboard and maps are indispensable in geography teaching. They are necessary to concrete the word.

Students working with a sand tray, 1916. University of Chicago archives.
This is the first and only time I recall “concrete” used as a verb. I like it. Farnham goes on to describe a student who (mistakenly) traced the course of the St. Lawrence River to its mouth at Lake Ontario (see map above, or, rather, at the top of the page).
But, probably, the most egregious example of north-up, south-down confusion is the description of Australia as the “Land Down Under.” When will this confused world finally start giving accurate directions to one of its continents?
try googling ‘bottom of Earth’ – and discover thousands of articles written by alleged ‘scientists’ who went to Antarctica on a scientific expedition and wrote about their experiences at the ‘bottom of Earth’…
the bottom of Earth is, of course, the CENTER of Earth…
it is elementary – north is not up and south is not down… point one arm up and the other arm north (or one arm south and the other arm down) and be amazed your arms are pointing in two different directions… and yet when traveling north – critucally unthinking mindless conditioned people (the vast majority) will invariably say they are going ‘up’, and ‘down’ when traveling south…
it is truly elementary…
Well said. The mis-association of north with “up” may also have implicit social and geopolitical implications. In anatomy, up is “superior” and down is “inferior” as in the superior and inferior vena cava. Does this kind of thinking negatively bias northern cultures’ attitudes toward anything from the Southern Hemisphire?