30 Day Map Challenge 2025 - Days 20-25

Here is another (almost) week of 30 Day Map Challenge maps featuring the Gulf of Mexico. If you need any background on why/where, you can review the first post of this series.

Day 20 - Water

Here is a map showing the currents and undersea landforms of the Gulf of Mexico. The loop current is an interesting process of water flows in and out of the Gulf. I took an image originally from Texas Pelagics, and repeated on numerous media sites, and placed it in the background. Several data sources combined for the inconsistent landform names. 

Day 21 - Icons 

There was a tiny bit of actual research involved, mainly using previous day's maps but mostly this was just fanciful. It was a fun map to make and after "improving" it a few times, I decided I liked the original version best.

Day 22 - Data Challenge: Natural Earth Dataset

I have a nice Natural Earth image from a previous year's challenge. I downloaded a bunch of infrastructure data and plopped it on top.

Day 23 - Process

We are supposed to show our process for making a selected map so here it is. I chose my skin cell map from Day 16 because there was a little bit of artistic work, but it's otherwise typical of my normal process. I mostly use QGIS along with the Mac program Keynote and GIMP. Keynote is not the most powerful software package but for simply laying out text and pictures, it does the job fine. I have more sophisticated software packages but those are my easy go to's, especially when doing a rush job. The map for Day 24, just below was all done in Keynote.

Day 24 - Places and their names

This map may not precisely fit the prompt but it gave me an excuse to make a Portolan Chart. I've wanted to make my own Portolan for a while and here was an excuse. The compass roses were lifted from this map.

Day 25 - Hexagons

This day's challenge encouraged us to "Celebrate this beautiful and effective tessellation". People commonly associate hexagons with bees so I took an article from CNN, and projected the info onto a hex grid.

Stay tuned for more Gulf of Mexico fun!

A Brief Look at "The American Revolution"

In between obsessing over 30 Day Map Challenges I’ve been watching The American Revolution on PBS. It’s impressive in its scope and ambition and the map content is wonderful. Lines are animated across historical maps, many of which I’ve never seen before, to show troop movements in red (British) and blue (American). Here is an example from the series that you can watch a clip of on their web site

This shows Brooklyn, NY and the Battle of Long Island. George Washington’s army was forced to retreat after failing to secure the Jamaica Pass over the Gowanus Heights. I had no idea that Brooklyn had such heights as to require people to travel through passes. I’ve never had much trouble getting through that area-it’s the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway around the perimeter that will kill you.

Here is an interactive map where you can click various battle sites to get more content. I like that when you choose the Battle of Trenton it starts snowing across New Jersey.

I have not had a chance to explore much of their web content, but having spent most of my life traveling between Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, and seeing signs for these battlefields all over the region, there will be much for me to explore. I may come back to this for a more in depth post in the future.

 

30 Day Map Challenge 2025 - Days 13-19

This was a difficult week for my personal 30 Day Map Challenge. I’ve been using the Gulf of Mexico as my theme. Some of the recent prompts have little to do with the Gulf and the results have neither been very inspiring and nor educational. Looking ahead, I think next week’s prompts will be better. Anyway here’s another 7 days.

Day 13 - 10 minute map

I drew this map during a work meeting. I did not have any visuals available so the accuracy is not great and Florida looks especially saggy.

Day 14 - this is one of the “Data Challenge” days - use OpenStreetMap. For Day 8 (urban) I had made a map of Veracruz, one of the larger cities on the Gulf Coast. I used OpenStreetMap for that data but it wasn’t very satisfying. Here I got a more complete data set and tried to flesh out the map. I like the silly idea of creating a guide to a place I’ve never been.

Day 15 - Fire. The Gulf Coast is not an area known for volcanoes or wildfires so I had to dig a little deeper. Power generation is a big part of the local economy so I went with power plants, and to double up on the theme made it into a heat map. The data is from a few Google searches, including some in Spanish to get sites in Mexico and Cuba. I removed hydro and wind power stations as they do not produce fire.

Day 16 - Cell. This is an unusual prompt. From the 30 Day web site ”This could be a geographic cell (raster, tessellation), a cellular network, or a biological/social process (e.g., disease spread).” I found an image of skin cells via study.com and overlaid it to look like the cells are colored by the Gulf’s geography.

Day 17 - A new tool. For this challenge I used MapLibre, a software library I’ve wanted to use for a while. I spent much time working on tutorials and trying things out but the end result was just taking one of Dr. Qiusheng Wu’s examples and mainly changing the location, bearing and pitch to get a 3D map of the Gulf of Mexico. I used the southernmost part of the Gulf because that is where the most dramatic topography is. Most of the rest of the region is quite flat.

Day 18 - Out of this world. Interesting idea for a prompt but not one that relates well to the Gulf of Mexico. I simply found an image on iStockPhoto and marked it up a bit.

Day 19 - Projections. Again a tricky one to relate to my theme. I did a recent post featuring the Spilhaus Projection and remembered how the Gulf of Mexico appears on it twice in many versions. I tried to make my own map, but two different software packages gagged on drawing that projection so I took a Wikipedia image and marked it up.

These last two days could be described as mostly effortless and uninformative but I’m taking what the challenge is giving and running with it. I’ve learned more about the Gulf in the last few days despite the meager output and hope to be able to show some of that knowledge over the next week.

30 Day Map Challenge 2025 - Days 6-12

Another week of my Gulf of Mexico 30 Day Map Challenges. Last week's are here.

Day 6 - Dimensions

The prompt “dimensions” can mean height, depth or multidimensional data. Since my focus is on a body of water, I went with bathymetry (water depth) using the same data from Day 5 but rendered with an attempted 3D look. 3D is definitely a weakness of mine and it shows here.

Day 7 - Accessibility

Again, here’s a prompt that can mean many things. I went with public beach access. The data came from a couple of different Google Map queries but it seems very incomplete, especially in Mexico.

Day 8 - Urban

This challenge should ideally be a learning experience for me and all of us. Veracruz is a large city, regional center and significant port that I know little about. Here is a map showing some of the city’s amenities. The data is from OpenStreetMap. I will be revisiting this for my Day 14 map.

Day 9 - Analog

I made a cut paper map of the Gulf of Mexico. Here it is presented with the land on top of a glass coffee table at my mother’s apartment against a piece blue fleece and the water piece in the back.

Day 10 - Air

I took an air quality map from PurpleAir and mixed and expanded the colors to try and present a more regionalized picture of air quality. The problem with that data is that because there are many fewer sensors in Mexico than the United States, the one in Tampico that had a very high (bad air) reading made the entire region look worse than it is. There was another sensor in Tampico with good readings but there are too few of them to moderate the bad readings. I probably should have moderated the map a bit more and not spread the red color so far and wide there. Veracruz was also impacted by a negative reading from a town over a hundred miles inland from there.

Day 11 - Minimal

For the minimal theme, I revisited the paper cut map, mainly because I liked this version I had made for Day 9 and here was an excuse to use it. This one is presented against my blue nylon jacket, standing in for the water.

Day 12 - Map from 2125

We are instructed to make a speculative map showing 100 years into the future. I used predicted sea level rise data from NOAA, a US agency, so there is no Mexico data. These estimates are conservative and are not as alarming as they maybe could be. I did a little airbrushing of the colors representing inundated areas and added some Chinese text to list the Chinese States of America, Mexico, the Gulf and the Special Administrative Autonomous Region of Houston. Just having some fun speculating, nothing to take too seriously.

Next week - more! 

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!