The 25 March 2024 xkcd honours Greenland’s place as a measure of cartographic distortion. It’s also, unexpectedly, a riff on the idea of the 1:1 scale map (cf. Borges), especially if you consult the comic’s alt text: “The Mercator projection drastically distorts the size of almost every area of land except a small ring around the North and South Poles.”
Previously: xkcd: The Greenland Special.
At some point, xkcd cartoonist Randall Munroe is going to put out a book focusing on his map-related cartoons, isn’t he. The latest in his “Bad Map Projection” series (previously: All South Americas, Time Zones, Liquid Resize) is The Greenland Special, an equal-area projection except for Greenland, which uses Mercator. And I thought he was messing with us before.
The British Antarctic Survey—which despite its name focuses its attention on both polar regions—has released a new one-sheet map of Greenland and the European Arctic. The 1:4,000,000-scale map covers a region from Baffin Island to Novaya Zemlya to Scotland: a region that’s usually on the edges of maps of the Arctic and Europe rather than getting its own map. More importantly, it’s a very recent snapshot of a rapidly changing region: the retreating ice sheet in Greenland is revealing new landscapes. The map costs £12 and is available either folded or rolled from Stanfords and the Scott Polar Research Institute. [BBC]
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory: “New maps of Greenland’s coastal seafloor and bedrock beneath its massive ice sheet show that two to four times as many coastal glaciers are at risk of accelerated melting as previously thought. Researchers at the University of California at Irvine (UCI), NASA and 30 other institutions have published the most comprehensive, accurate and high-resolution relief maps ever made of Greenland’s bedrock and coastal seafloor. Among the many data sources incorporated into the new maps are data from NASA’s Ocean Melting Greenland (OMG) campaign.”
The Arctic Journal reports on recent efforts to produce more detailed, systematic and accurate maps of Greenland.
Danish officials today announced promising initial results of a project using satellites to collect cartographic data faster and more efficiently than has been possible using aeroplanes.
The project involved using SPOT 6 and 7, two commercially operated European satellites, flying at an altitude of 700km to collect images of four specific areas […]. The pictures they returned over a two-year period beginning in 2015 each measure 360 square km. Objects as small as 1.5 m can be discerned in the pictures, making them detailed enough to be used to make precise, high-resolution maps.
Cartographers are now in the process of turning the data into finished, on-line maps. The maps themselves are expected to publicly available by autumn. But, even before that, the data gathered by the satellites will be placed on-line.
[WMS]
Lois Parshley’s essay on the last unmapped, mysterious places—Greenlandic fjords, the slums of Haiti, the ocean’s depths, black holes in space—is a long read worth reading. Originally published last month as “Here Be Dragons: Finding the Blank Spaces in a Well-Mapped World” in the Virginia Quarterly Review, it’s been reprinted by the Guardian, in an edited, tighter version, as “Faultlines, Black Holes and Glaciers: Mapping Uncharted Territories.”
NASA: “NASA researchers have helped produce the first map showing what parts of the bottom of the massive Greenland Ice Sheet are thawed— key information in better predicting how the ice sheet will react to a warming climate.”
