Belize 3D Wood Map | Laser-Cut Birch Depth Chart
How the Water Becomes Wood
A chart is a stack of flat sheets until the water's real soundings tell it what shape to take.
- SurveyReal bathymetric sounding data sets every contour line before a single cut is made.
- CutEach depth band is laser-cut from its own sheet of Baltic birch, up to nine layers deep.
- StainWater layers are stained by hand, reading darker the deeper the water runs.
- StackThe sheets are registered and stacked in sequence, and the bed's true shape rises out of the wood.
- EtchDepths and place names are burned into the grain itself, never printed on it.
- FrameA solid Baltic birch frame and acrylic glass finish the piece, ready to hang.
Belize in laser-cut Baltic birch, 13.5 by 31 inches: the coast, the cayes, and the longest barrier reef in the hemisphere carved one depth contour per layer, with the ocean's most famous hole at its heart.
Belize's reef runs some 190 miles, the largest barrier reef in the northern hemisphere, sheltering a lagoon dotted with cayes from backpacker-beloved Caulker to Ambergris's dive docks. Beyond it lie the atolls, and in one of them waits the Great Blue Hole, a collapsed cavern 400 feet deep and a thousand across, so perfectly round from above that it became the country's signature image. On the chart, the reef draws its engraved line down the birch with the lagoon pale inside it, and the Blue Hole sits as a startling dark ring of layers amid Lighthouse Reef's shallows.
Contours are laser-cut sheet by sheet, stacked by hand, engraved, and set behind acrylic glass in a solid Baltic birch frame.
Go slow, as the cayes' signs say. The chart complies permanently.
The engraving spans Belize City and the cayes, the reef's full run, Turneffe, and Lighthouse Reef with the Blue Hole.
- 13.5 × 31 in
- Solid Baltic birch frame
- Acrylic glass front, ready to hang
- Free next-business-day shipping on orders placed by 2 PM EST
- 14-day returns
Live from the water