“The glaciers are melting, and I have more work to do,” as Adrian Dähler, part of that special group, put it.

Dähler is one of only three cartographers at the agency—the Federal Office of Topography, or Swisstopo—allowed to tinker with the Swiss Alps, the centerpiece of the country’s map. Known around the office as “felsiers,” a Swiss-German nickname that loosely translates as “the people who draw rocks,” Dähler, along with Jürg Gilgen and Markus Heger, are experts in shaded relief, a technique for illustrating a mountain (and any of its glaciers) so that it appears three-dimensional. Their skills and creativity also help them capture consequences of the thawing permafrost, like landslides, shifting crevasses and new lakes.

The article is a fascinating look at an extraordinarily exacting aspect of cartography. [WMS]

* Well, yesterday: it’s already tomorrow in New Zealand.

The map accompanying the Indigenous People’s Atlas of Canada is a map of Indigenous Canada: as iPolitics’s Anna Desmarais reports, “Dotting the map are the names of Indigenous languages, including Cree and Dene, and the geographical location where each language is spoken. The size of the word, officials said, depends on how big the Indigenous population is in a given region.” Meanwhile, the names and borders of provinces and territories are apparently absent, and the only cities that appear on the map are the ones with substantial Indigenous populations. It sounds marvellous. [WMS]

Previously: The Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada.

The Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada is finally on the verge of publication. First announced in June 2017, and unveiled in its final form in June 2018 (Canadian Geographic, CBC News, Ottawa Citizen, press release), the atlas is a massive project several years in the making and involving input from indigenous communities across Canada. The result of a collaboration between the Royal Canadian Geographic Society, the Assembly of First Nations, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the Métis Nation, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation and Indspire, the atlas project includes a four-volume physical atlas, an online version, and additional teaching resources, including new giant floor maps from Canadian Geographic.¹

The physical atlas’s four volumes include one for First Nations, one for the Inuit, one for the Métis, and one focusing on Truth and Reconciliation. It has a list price of C$99.99 (online sellers will have it for less) and comes out in one week, on September 25th: Amazon. A French-language version comes out next month, on October 23rd: Amazon.

The online version of the atlas has the text but very little in the way of maps: I can only assume that this is not the case for the book versions. The companion app, for iOS and Android, does little more than link to the web version and includes a location finder for land acknowledgment.

The news buzz about this atlas in this country is considerable: see recent coverage from the Canadian Press, CBC News and the Globe and Mail. This looks to be a cultural watershed event the likes of which I have not seen since the publication of The Canadian Encyclopedia in 1985. I expect a lot of copies to be sold.

This is a map of the United States without insets. Published in 1975 by the U.S. Geological Survey, it shows Alaska, Hawaii and the lower 48 states in the same, continuous view—though Hawaii’s Leeward Islands are cut off (as are the various territories). Can’t have everything, I guess. It’s available from the USGS as a free downloadable PDF; the paper version costs $9. [MapPorn]

Previously: Alaska’s Cartographic Revenge.

At the CCA’s annual conference earlier this year, Natural Resources Canada launched its updated map of the North Circumpolar Region, which “shows the geography of the northern circumpolar region, north of approximately 55 degrees, at a scale of 1:9 000 000. The map uses the azimuthal equidistant projection. It includes all international boundaries, as well as the Canadian provincial and territorial boundaries and Canada’s 200 nautical mile offshore exclusive economic zone. National capital cities are shown, as are other cities, towns, villages and hamlets. Some seasonally populated places are also included. The map displays a number of significant northern features, including the median sea ice extent for September 1981 to 2010, the tree line, undersea relief, land relief, the Magnetic North Pole, glaciers, ice fields and coastal ice shelves. Many of the physiographic and hydrographic features are labelled.” [Cartophilia]

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]

Switzerland is updating its official map series. The new maps are digitally based and use new fonts, symbols and colours—railways, for example, are now in red. They replace the 1:25,000 series that dates back to the 1950s; all 247 sheets should be replaced by 2019. You can compare the old and new map designs on this interactive map (screencap above). [via]

The federal government’s new map of Canada, part of the Atlas of Canada reference series, came out this week. Among the changes between it and its predecessor (which came out in 2006), one in particular is drawing attention. Ivan Semeniuk in the Globe and Mail:

Whereas the older version of the map showed only that part of the sea ice that permanently covered Arctic waters year round at that time, the new edition uses a 30-year median of September sea-ice extent from 1981 through 2010. September sea ice hit a record low in 2012 and is projected to decline further. The change means there is far more ice shown on the 2015 version of the map than on its predecessor.

The changes can be seen below: the 2006 map is on the left, the 2015 map on the right.

Now as Semeniuk’s piece points out, neither way is wrong. But all maps have a point of view, and it’s naive to think that this change was made in a value-neutral environment: this was the result of a conscious decision. The reason for that decision—that’s what’s interesting.