Merry Gridmas!

 Gridviz is a Javascript library for visualizing gridded (raster) data. They created a Christmas themed map showing land use with holiday emojis. 

Also if you visit the Gridmas page you can watch the snow fall over Europe. You can pan and zoom around, however if you try to go elsewhere in the world you’ll see that the data has its limits.

There are a few options at the bottom of the page, allowing you to change the view to a population map showing how many Christmas elves live in each grid cell using your emoji of choice.

So, have yourself a merry gridmas!

 

 

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.