Sketchy Boats

Sketchy Boats is a site created by maritime researcher Christian Panton. It tracks ships with “murky paperwork, shady ownership, strange port calls, and a suspicious tendency to vanish from tracking systems”. Sketchiness scores are calculated by a number of red flags including switching flags or names, questionable insurance documents, spending time off the coasts of sanctioned countries and going dark from tracking systems. There is a globe you can spin to see a heat map of these ships. 

You can also bring up the list of ships and click for more information.

Here is a detail of the Ocean Embrace, one of the ships with a top sketchiness score, currently sailing under the flag of Sierra Leone.

There are also links below to other tracking sites such as VesselFinder and Global Fishing Watch, which has its own ship tracking visualizations.

More on this project from Christian Panton's web site

 

 

Banned Books Map

Happy Banned Books Week. As book burning fever persists across the land the Little Free Library organization is fighting back with a map showing book bans across the USA.

-from the Book Ban Map, slightly altered to show all map elements together.

The map is a bit confusing in that the numbers are libraries, not book bans. Bans are colored by state, but not shown more locally than that.

You can find your area, get info on specific libraries and 

use their mobile app to find Little Free Libraries to deliver books to.

More on Little Free Library’s fight against censorship here.

 

African Migration Myths and Reality

I saw this very interesting map on Global Threads, a blog from Oxford Professor of Global History Peter Frankopan. 

It shows migration within Africa. Despite headlines and pictures of dangerous boat crossings, the vast majority of these migrations take place within Africa. Less than 1% of Sub-Saharan Africans migrate outside the continent. “In some cases, routes within Africa are more lethal than the highly publicised ones across Mediterranean itself.” These facts are obscured by the focus on European immigration.

The countries receiving the most migrants are Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and South Africa. Almost 10 percent of Egypt’s population are migrants though oddly there are no arrows there on this map. Ethiopia, Sudan and Uganda are major host countries for refugees despite their own internal problems. The other takeaway is that most of this migration takes place within the major regional economic communities-the colored areas.

To not simply repeat Frankopan’s blog post (though it is well worth reading), I did some research and came across the International Organization for Migration’s annual World Migration Report. It is full of interesting graphics and as you scroll down there are flow arrows connecting the countries or origin (on the left) and destination (right) of migrants. The arrows are sized by numbers with the top five destinations (or origins) listed. Here is an example from Mali showing only one European country at the bottom of its top five destinations.

Looking at a European country’s (Italy) top sources of migrants, only one of these countries is in Africa. France has three (former French colonies) while Germany and Britain have no African countries in their top five.

This south to south, rather than south to north migration is in Frankopan’s words, “binding African economies and societies together in ways that are under-recognised in global debates.”

Selling the Dream of Southern California

Southern California may have lost some of its sparkle in recent decades but in the early to mid-20th Century it was largely seen as the perfect American dream location. A slew of pictorial maps were created to entice people to come and live the dream. A typical example is this “Roads to Romance” map covered in a previous blog post. I took a photo of the map at the La Jolla Map Museum on a visit in 2019.

The map is full of oranges, lemons and happy people fishing, swimming and cruising around in boats. Even the fish seem to be enjoying the place. The full title is "Ride the Roads to Romance along the Golden Coast thru the Sunshine Empire of Southern California".

Another example promotes the city of Pomona highlighting its central location to “the nation’s all season playground”. The bottom right corner lists the distances from Pomona to other nearby destinations.

-via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Inc.

The Automobile Club of Southern California had its own agenda of encouraging a good drive to see the beautiful sites. 

-via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Inc.

Back in 1962 even the freeways were fun!

-via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Inc.

The idea of freeway fun these days might seem a bit dated or absurd.

Another very yellow example by the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce invites you to make their city your vacation headquarters.

-via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Inc.

Also, don’t forget Hollywood, the “glamour capital of the world”.

-via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Inc.

In a slightly earlier era (1928) Fox Films published regular Hollywood Amusement Directories with maps showing the theater locations.

-via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Inc.

The glamour also captured on a 1953 menu from the Brown Derby.

-via New Yorker

By 1977 Life in Los Angeles had become quite a bit less ideal. Eugene Turner mapped areas of the city using Chernoff faces. The west side is the only truly contented looking area, the rest of the city showing signs of stress. I like this map so much I highlighted it in one of my earliest blog posts.

Since the 1970’s the image of Southern California has taken further hits as exemplified by this postcard.

-via Flicker - I once had this postcard but mailed it away.

Yet the charm persists in maps like those of Dave Stephens maps available on plates, clocks, mugs and pillows at sites like Zazzle. 

A World of Tides

The most recent issue of ArcUser, a magazine for Esri GIS software users spotlights cartographer Dave Taylor’s striking Oceanic Oscillations map.

The map shows tidal ranges around the world using a black background and the Spilhaus Projection. The projection was created to show an unbroken view of the world’s oceans. All map projections require distortions, this one maximizes them on the land, particularly in South America (see how it sprawls across the left) and in China.

The color scheme emphasizes the macrotidal areas, such as Canada’s Fundy and Ungava Bays in a bright white. Areas with low tidal variation such as the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico fade into the background.

Contour lines show tidal variation. I’ve never thought about tides existing in the middle of oceans but there they are.

It’s strange how few areas exist between the extreme 16 meter tides of the Bay of Fundy and the 2 meter ranges. Only 1% of the world’s tides are above 4 meters according to the legend. Here is one of the few purple areas on the map, off the coast of China.

In the article Taylor discusses the challenge of keeping the Sea of Japan, with its very low tidal range from disappearing into the land. You can see this from the above image. Perhaps a color less similar to the land’s black could have been used for the lowest category. Additional texture was created by adding some shaded bathymetry as seen in the trenches off the coast of Japan above. Overall the combination of colors, projection and subject matter create a stunning visual effect. This is best appreciated when viewing the map as a whole (seen at the top but repeated below for emphasis.)

 

The Oxford Drinking Map

With a new college year begun, students need a good map of their local watering holes. These days there are plenty of Google Maps versions of these for your area. Here is an old school version from 1883.

-via Bodleian Library

According to this blog post, this map is one of the most popular items at the Bodleian Library. It was ironically produced by the local temperance society to negatively portray the prevalence of alcohol (“drunkenness abounds in our midst”) in the city.

To emphasize drinking establishments there are no buildings and few landmarks shown. The legend uses shapes to distinguish drinking houses and breweries.

Though mainly known as a college town, the University does not appear on this map. Students were not allowed into city pubs and the colleges would have had their own bars. That area, in the northwestern part of the city is therefore largely empty of red dots.

There are few establishments in the northern, more upper class parts of the city suggesting that those of wealth and power were working to keep them away. However, as discussed in the blog post, St John’s College owned most of the land in north Oxford and had their own restrictions on land use and alcohol sales.

Another interesting bit is that breweries (the red squares) clustered near the castle where access to water was good.

The major river is the River Isis, an alternate name for the more well known Thames River. Down by the Folly Bridge there is a Thames and an Isis Street though Isis Street appears to be no more.

 Like this map? You can buy it at the Bodleian Shop.

 

 

 

 

The Bog Defense

A recent article in Politico details how eastern Europe’s bogs could be used as a defensive wall against Russian aggression. A defense consultant in Ukraine realized that by breaching a dam northeast of Kyiv and re-flooding the valley, the restored bogs and marshes could stop Russian tanks from advancing. Now with other countries under threat from Russia, bog restoration is being considered throughout the region.

These bogs also have the added benefit of acting as major carbon sinks. Half of the European Union’s peatlands are degraded, mostly drained for agriculture. These degraded peatlands are a huge contributor to global warming. The EU’s Nature Restoration Law requires countries to revive 30 percent of these lands by 2030.

Most of these peatlands are located along the borders with Russia and Belarus, its partner state. Troops cannot easily cross these lands and tanks get stuck in the bogs. Not all countries are equal in their enthusiasm for the project and there is significant pushback from farmers. Much of the current focus is on state owned lands but any major effort will require working with the farming communities.

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UNRELATED BONUS CONTENT: Here is a short video taken by a customer at the Map Center, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. It is one of the last map stores left in the United States. Andrew Middleton (your cartographic sommelier) bought the store a couple of years ago and enthusiastically discusses his experiences running the operation.