My Favorite New Jersey Drone Map

 Here is my favorite “map” showing the drone hysteria over New Jersey. It’s from Instagram user wmh_x_0, aka Oona Harrigan.

 

It is based on these maps of drone sightings that have been going around the internet.

The “globe” text is there because she is known for designing sad globes. This is part of a dress design, possibly for Irish dancing. Here is the whole dress. She does not mention what materials are used so that is all I know.

 
 

Ice Flows in Greenland

 The Atlas of the Invisible was published a few years ago. The maps show trends in the earth’s climate and demographics that are largely hidden to the naked eye. I never got a chance to review it but was recently struck by this visualization.

A detailed description of the map’s data and creation can be found here along with commentary from James Cheshire, one of the authors. The maps uses data from NASA that tracks the flow of ice. The colors represent flow velocity, highest near the coasts, probably due to steeper elevation changes. I assume the graph in the lower left is showing the decrease in the mass of glaciers. 

More information in the atlas can be found here.

 

30 Day Map Challenge-One Final Note

In writing yesterday’s post I forgot about this awesome music video about the 30 Day Map Challenge. The lyrics are French with English subtitles and it’s fun to hear how musical words like choropleth and story map can sound in French. “Some people sell houses, chickens, bidets, I do make maps!”

 

30 Day Map Challenge 2024-Part 2

Here is the second half of the 30 Day Map Challenge. The one where I don’t make anything but just sit back and enjoy the work of others. The first half of the month was reviewed here.

I will start on Day 23 where the prompt was memory. There were quite a few good entries for this day but I really liked this one from Bluesky user Terence showing the turtles in Kapalua Bay, Maui, Hawaii.

There were many childhood memory maps. Here is a computerized hand drawn looking map look by Josh Carlson showing the safe route for a child to get ice cream.

The prompt for Day 18 was 3D. 3D maps are hard to make and I like the way Keith Jenkins handled it. Towns that have 3 d’s in their names.

Day 19 was typography day. There were many interesting approaches but I liked this one kilometer on the River Thames by Mastodon user tlohde.

Day 27-micromapping had many great examples of intimate places. This map by Gaëlle Sutton shows Grise Fiord (Aujuittuq) on Ellesmere Island, Canada where in 1953 eight Inuit families were forcibly relocated from their home on the shore of Hudson Bay in Quebec, 2000 kilometers to the south. The small locator map at the bottom illustrates where and how far apart this places are. They were not allowed back home until 1987. The bleak color scheme conveys the landscape nicely.

For a bit of fun, the geospatial company Kontur made this map of the “fruity” solar system for Day 24 (circles).

This is one of may favorites. Day 28’s theme was “the blue planet”. Stephen Kennedy of the LatLong Shop in Madison Wisconsin made this map of notable waterbodies of Wisconsin. They are classified by being known locally, globally or in between. Each one as a descriptor about what makes it notable. 

Day 30’s prompt was “the final map”. Here is a map of Switzerland by Cédric Vidonne, whose work was also featured in the previous post.

I’m impressed that someone can make something this intricate in R, primarily a statistics package. When I’ve tried to make anything using R, it’s been pretty crude. You can see his R code here. 

Also this final map from Hans van der Kwast showing colored river basins.

There were so many more wondrous maps I would have loved to include but I can only fit so much into a blog post.

 

The Salt Front

The salt front is the point where a river becomes too salty to be safe for drinking water. The front moves upstream from the river’s mouth as less freshwater flows downstream to dilute it. I’d never heard of a salt front until I read about it in a recent article in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The region’s severe drought in November caused this front to move significantly further upstream than the median monthly location.

On the map above, via the Delaware River Basin Commission (cropped for ease of reading), the pink area is the median salt front location and the pink arrow shows the normal location of this front in November, near Wilmington, Delaware. The blue arrow shows the location as of November 18, 2024. 

The DRBC monitors freshwater flows to keep the salt front from migrating too far upstream. This protects drinking water and industrial water intakes. There are major drinking water intakes for both Philadelphia and New Jersey at the blue box on the map. One way to keep freshwater flowing is to release water from various upstream dams.

The worst droughts were in the mid 1960’s-this shot from one of their videos shows the most upstream movement of the front on November 20, 1964,

and here is a still map showing more specifically the salt front’s furthest upstream location during the “drought of record”

 

Finally, here is a screen shot from the hydrologic conditions dashboard, showing conditions on November 23, 2024.

 

30 Day Map Challenge-Admiring the Work of Others

For the past several years November for me has meant working on the 30 Day Map Challenge. This year I’ve been too busy to participate - also I really needed a break from it. Not participating means I’ve been able to admire the work of other cartographers. Here are some highlights from the first 15 days. 

Since I am no longer on Twitter most of these are from Mastodon or BlueSky but I’ve tried to post links to the author’s own sites where possible. I really like the above representation of population as peaks by Cédric Vidonne for Day 13 (use a new tool). In a mountainous country like Switzerland, the population is mainly in the flattest areas so this is almost a reverse reality. You can read more on his Github page.

This map of lighthouses in Taiwan by Chen-Chia Ku is a nice pick for Day 1 (points)

For Day 2 (lines) here is a nice hachure map of England’s Lake District by Jo Wood. Details and more maps can be found on his Obervable page.

Day 7 (vintage style) - here is a map of UFO sightings in Denmark by Kurt Menke.

Day 11’s theme was Arctic. Here is a language map of the region by Bluesky user terence. 

Day 15’s theme was “my data”.  Erwan Rivault mapped his change jar to show where he’s been.

Here is a cool antipodes map/video for Day 14 (World Map) from Steve Faeembra. 

 Finally - the Day 9 prompt was to make a map using AI. I’m kind of fascinated with these two examples. User Tomasral asked ChatGPT for a map of the railway lines of Asturias in Spain. The result includes a bunch of alternate spellings of “narrow gauge” as well as the cities of Oviedo, Aviles and the Bay of Biscay.

Aquila Flower had a similar result with ChatGPT making a pictorial map of the Salish Sea in British Columbia and Washington State.

Countries with Women Leaders

Here is a map from the Washington Post, via Reddit showing countries past & present with women as heads of state. Click it (and then again) for higher resolution.

We in the United States like to think we are the most advanced country in the world but by this metric we are well behind much of the world. Here is another take from Statitsa from April. This one predated the election of Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico in October so imagine Mexico as yellow for the complete picture.

This map has some large differences from the first one in Africa where the Democratic Republic of Congo is shown (female prime minister but male president) as well as Mozambique, Mali, Ethiopia and Gabon. However, the second map does not show the Central African Republic, Myanmar (Burma)  or Bolivia. There are probably other smaller countries that are inconsistent between the two maps but these are the ones that jump out.

This One

This one map (via New York Times) tells you quite a bit about what happened in the U.S. Election on Tuesday.

Aside from a few strange outliers (western Oklahoma, suburban Atlanta, northwest Michigan) The "red shift" happened across all regions and demographics. Hard to look at if you care about democracy, honesty, tolerance and basic decency but also undeniable. I have nothing else to say. Heaven help us - and Ukraine too.
 

Bad News For Local News

Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative released the latest State of Local News. It highlights the dire state of print journalism with maps to illustrate the problems. This one highlights counties that are on the watch list to become news deserts.

News deserts are defined as counties with no local news outlet. Counties on the watch list have only one news outlet and a high poverty rate putting them at an elevated risk of losing that outlet. You can hover over each county for specifics on this map.

The six largest newspaper chains own about 20% of the country’s daily and weekly papers with a presence in every state except for West Virginia.

 

Digital local news sites are also concentrated among a few major players while geographically concentrated in metropolitan areas.

For some levity, a few bright spots are also highlighted. These are startup news organizations”creatively working toward sustainable business models” - the white dots on the map below as well as some featured spots (the blue stars). The counties are colored by number of news outlets from 0 (very dark) to 10 or more (the brightest colors).

The full report can be seen here.

Terrain Representations from the Atlas of Design

In last week’s post I reviewed Volume 7 of the Atlas of Design. As an occasional cartographer I have been interested in how topography is represented in maps for a long time. This atlas volume provides many contrasting examples. From the “cartographic realism” of Tom Patterson’s Malaspina Glacier map,

to the sketchy, hatchy peaks of the Adirondack Paint Map (with added shading), 

to the very subtle shading of the Purple Lizard Maps recreation map of Pennsylvania.

There are quite a few very different approaches and this post will be more about appreciation than technique. I wish I could speak more about the processes used but I know little beyond using the standard hill shading algorithms in mapping software and one or two not very successful tries at using Rayshader. I suspect these techniques were at least partially used in many of these maps but there are many artistic flourishes these cartographers have used. 

Wild World by Anton Thomas is pure art with computers only used to position features. Here is his drawing of the Matterhorn in Switzerland.

Ian Reese’s Aotearoa/New Zealand Map used many layers and blending modes between them to get his semi realistic look.

For the Santorini Islands map Spyridon Strides uses contour lines combined with shading.

The Zibo Map of Culture and Tourism uses a mixture of colors and shades to create a green fuzzy effect.

How do you represent terrain on the moon? In this case with well placed dots.

The “Centroamerica se mueve” map uses subtle watercolor effects.

The map of Scotch distilleries uses a “layered pie” overlay of hill shading colored in a blue to gold gradient with some mist to add depth to the lowlands.

The Journey to the West map uses an interesting layer cake look with a contour and shading combination. Though it does not look as realistic as some of the above examples, I like the effect.

Finally, “Spain’s Muslim Era”, made for National Geographic uses a very subtle hill shading in order to not compete with all the other dense information typical of NatGeo maps.