30 Day Map Challenge 2025-Days 1-5

Another November means another #30DayMapChallenge. As I mentioned in last week’s post I’m doing this again, focused on the Gulf of Mexico. This is mainly as a protest at how the major map providers have voluntarily followed a silly and non legally binding executive order on renaming it based on the whims of one person’s ego.

I don’t know very much about the Gulf and have spent little time in the regions surrounding it (see Day 4’s map) so this should be a learning experience for me. I’m already finding it challenging to tie every theme to the Gulf while also trying to be at least a bit creative. Here it goes, each days theme is listed below with commentary where needed:

Day 1 - Points. 

Oil drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. Data source: databasin.org

Day 2 - Lines

Oil and gas pipelines. Data source: NOAA

Day 3 - Polygons

States surrounding the Gulf of Mexico. In the case of Cuba these are provinces. I intentionally left country names and boundaries off to try and show this as more of an international region, however the boundaries are still pretty clear.

Day 4 - My Data. The prompt is to “map something personal” so here is a hand drawn map of where I’ve been along the Gulf.

Day 5 - Earth. Bathymetry of the Gulf of Mexico. Data source: Gulf Coastal Ocean Observing System. 

I found this fun sinking font called Titanic. At first I only had the Gulf labeled but then I was reminded of the Tragically Hip’s song “New Orleans is Sinking” and decided I had to see how that looked in this font. 

Next week - hopefully more! 

As the United States slides deeper into fascism, here is a map showing new and expanding prison facilities, largely to house people, whose only crimes are to have arrived here without documentation, just as most of our ancestors did (see graph below if you doubt this). 

-via Mother Jones

The map above is originally from the Washington Post, but due to their paywall you likely won’t be able to see it there. It was reprinted as part of an article in Mother Jones on trump’s detention state. 

From their article you can zoom and click away to see details like “Work Ethic Camp” in Nebraska, a name that eerily sounds like Auschwitz’s “work will set you free” motto.

If you’re thinking we need these “camps” because these people must have done something wrong, this graph from the Guardian, linked in the Mother Jones article shows the vast and criminal increase of detentions of people with no criminal history.

Program Note: In November I will be embarking on another 30 Day Map Challenge. I skipped it last year but this Spring, after being annoyed at the quickness of major mapping services to cave into the renaming places based on the whims of an arrogant president, I told my social media followers I would do a challenge where every map is of the Gulf of Mexico. I plan to keep that promise but also promised myself that I won’t let it take over my life for the next month so don’t expect too much cartographic brilliance.

 

 

 

 

 

Remrkable River "Map"

This “map” should absolutely not be used for navigation. More of an illustrative graphic than a true map, it is geographically accurate in many ways while placing rivers that are continents away as neighbors.

-via David Rumsey Map Collection

Titled “A Map of the Principal Rivers Shewing Their Courses, Countries, and Comparative Lengths“, it was created in 1834 in England by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Rivers radiate around a circle based on their orientation of flow. That is how you get Italy’s Po River situated between China’s Yangtze and the Amazon in South America - all east-flowing rivers.

The amazing trick of this map is how the authors were able to fit river courses into each other with minimal distortion of directions or lengths. Here you can see how the Amur River flows over the top of the Great Lakes with the entire area nestled into the Amazon’s curving headwater tributaries.

Some sacrifices had to be made here such as cutting off the major south flowing tributaries of the Amazon but I love the way they folded Brazil and Peru around Mongolia.

There is a cliche (at least here in North America) that few rivers flow northwards. This map shows that many of the world’s longest rivers including the Nile, Lena and Yenisei (Ienisei on here) flow north.

At the top of the map is a legend. The word “character” is confusing here but I think it just refers to the different line symbols (dots, dashes, etc) used to distinguish the river by their continents.

At the bottom is a chart “shewing” the length of each river and some text stating that the concentric circles at 200 mile increments are to give a general idea of the distance to the sea.

Not just impressive in its scope, the map also highlights some beautiful details with hatch lines for topography, parallel lines implying water depth, shading and a very restrained bit of blue shading for water bodies.

Browse this map here.

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.