When I saw the xkcd for October 6th, I said to myself: that can’t be right. But I checked and yes, Wollaston Lake and Isa Lake are bifurcation lakes, so it is.
xkcd’s Dubious Islands Aren’t Technically Wrong
Tag: North America
Daniel Huffman’s Atlas of North American Rivers
Add An Atlas of North American Rivers to the list of Daniel Huffman’s long-unfinished projects that suddenly got finished lately. It’s a 48-page PDF of diagrammatic maps of North American river systems, from Alaska to Guatemala. The PDF can be downloaded here; if there’s interest he’ll do a hardcopy version, and, of course, prints are available for sale.
Previously: Landforms of Michigan.
Preorders Open for Anton Thomas’s North America Map
It’s been years in the making, but prints of Anton Thomas’s pictorial map, North America: Portrait of a Continent, can now be pre-ordered.
Three versions are available: a 42×52-inch (107×132.5-cm) poster, a 44×54-inch (111.7×138.3-cm) giclée print in a limited edition of 1,200, and a 48×59-inch (121×149.6-cm) giclée print in a limited edition of 400. Prices will be shown in your local currency: in Canadian dollars they’re $95, $490 and $765, respectively. These are discounted prices for pre-orders. Shipping outside Australia will be by UPS (I was quoted a shipping fee of US$35 at checkout), and will begin on April 16.
My main concerns are where I’m going to put it, and how I’m going to have it framed. But I’ll worry about that later.
Previously: The North American Continent: A Pictorial Map by Anton Thomas; An Update on Anton Thomas’s Map of North America.
An Update on Anton Thomas’s Map of North America
Anton Thomas’s pictorial map of North America (previously) is now complete, and he’ll be selling giclée prints and posters from his website soon. (I know exactly where mine will be going.) In the above video, he looks at the multiyear process of creating the map—on paper, with pencils and pen, and how he had to correct and redraw (the inked parts!) as he went. Here’s an interview he did with Atlas Obscura last month.
Cartographic Beasts of North America
Cartographic Beasts of North America is an interactive story map from the Harvard Map Collection. It zooms in on various mythical and real creatures embellishing a 19th-century copy of a 17th-century map of North America, ranging from cows and beavers (real) to hippocampi and manitous (um, not). [Maps Mania]
The North American Continent: A Pictorial Map by Anton Thomas
Since 2014 Anton Thomas has been working on a large and detailed hand-drawn pictorial map of North America. Done on a 120-×-150-cm piece of art paper with coloured pencils and pen, and full of little pictorial details, The North American Continent has taken more than 4,000 hours to draw—and re-draw. In an update earlier this month, Anton estimates there are still 200 hours of work remaining; he expects to be done by December, with prints going on sale early next year.
The map was the subject of two talks Anton gave at NACIS last year: see Drawing a Continent by Hand and Methods of a Hand-Drawn Map. And take note: Anton lives in Australia, but at the moment he’s in the U.S. to give talks and work out printing and distribution. He’ll be giving a presentation tomorrow evening at the Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library. (Another talk is scheduled for October 24 at the Rumsey Map Center in San Francisco Stanford.)
Update: Another talk, on October 6, in New York.
NATRF2022 Datum Coming to North America in 2022
Geoff Zeiss posts about the forthcoming NATRF2022 datum, which will replace NAD 83 and NAVD 88 in 2022. It will address the shortcomings of the earlier datums and for the first time provide a common datum for Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. “Practically,” Geoff writes, “this means that elevations may change by up to a meter and horizontal location by up to 1.5 meters. The actual corrections to elevations and horizontal locations will depend on where you are in North America. The greatest changes are in the Pacific Northwest and the least in the southeastern U.S.” [Dave Smith]
Migrations in Motion
Migrations in Motion models the average directions wildlife will need to move in order to survive the effects of climate change. As Canadian Geographic explains, “As climate change disrupts habitats, researchers believe wildlife will instinctively migrate to higher elevations and latitudes, but for many species, that will mean navigating around, over or through human settlements and infrastructure.” The map, the design of which is modeled on the hint.fm wind map, covers both North and South America and does not purport to model the path of individual species; rather it’s an average based on computer modelling.
A Fantasy Map of North America
The latest map of the real world done in the style of fantasy maps (remember: fantasy maps have a distinct style), at least that I’ve encountered, is this map of North America offered by Etsy seller Aoraki Maps. (They also have one of the southeastern U.S.) The style is very fantasy map, with cursive labels rather than the (older) Didone-style lettering. [Boing Boing]
Previously: Fantasy Maps of U.S. Cities; A Fantasy Map of Ireland; A Fantasy Map of Great Britain; A Fantasy Map of Australia; A Fantasy Map of the U.S.