The Map Room

Maps compiled from data from NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) reveal the extent of ice sheet thinning in Antarctica and Greenland.

ICESat’s precise laser altimetry instrument, launched in 2003, has provided a high-density web of elevation measurements repeated year after year across the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. … The maps confirm that the profound ice sheet thinning of recent years stems from fast-flowing glaciers that empty into the sea. This was particularly the case in West Antarctica, where the Pine Island Glacier was found to be thinning between 2003 and 2007 by as much as 6 meters per year. In Greenland, fast-flowing glaciers were shown to thin by an average of nearly 0.9 meters per year.

Via Slashdot. Image credit: British Antarctic Survey/NASA.

Boston’s MBTA is upgrading the maps in its stations; some of the neighbourhood maps haven’t been upgraded in 40 years. The system maps show services that will not be operational for another month, but that’s nothing compared to the trouble with Toronto’s station maps. The Toronto Transit Commission has gotten into trouble for the neighbourhood maps in its stations, thanks to several embarrassing typos and omissions; the TTC says that corrected maps will be in place by the end of October. Via All Points Blog.

The grass is always greener on the other side, Peter Batty argues in this rather funny “georant” at last week’s AGI GeoCommunity 09 in which he defends the Ordnance Survey, sort of, by pointing out that there are significant disadvantages to the U.S.’s free-data policies, too. (Unfortunately the video cuts off rather abruptly.)

Update: The slides from Peter’s talk (via).

Update #2, Oct. 15: Peter’s belated blog entry on the subject.

Cold War era Soviet maps of the UK have gotten some mainstream media attention over the past month or so: the Guardian looks at a 1974 map showing invasion routes into Manchester, in the context of a local exhibition; the Southern Daily Echo’s focus is on Southampton, and on the work of Alex Kent of the University of Southampton’s Cartographic Unit, which has a page on the maps and offers reprints for sale. Via MapHist.

Previously: Soviet Spies Map the World; Soviet Mapping Update; Soviet Spy Maps for Sale.

You may recall that iPhoto ’09 supports geotagging, but requires manual input or a camera with a built-in or connected GPS unit — GPS loggers aren’t supported. Enter myTracks 2.0, a 10€ program that supports a number of GPS loggers and can add location data directly into iPhoto’s database. (I can’t evaluate this because, well, I don’t have a GPS logger.) It wouldn’t surprise me if there were more options for this sort of thing; third-party solutions to gaps in Apple’s feature sets tend to be multiple.

Previously: iPhoto, Geotagging, GPS and the Mac: A Post-Macworld Roundup.

Stephen Von Worley has compiled a map showing the location of every McDonald’s in the lower 48 states, as an exercise in determining “just how far away can you get from our world of generic convenience.” Where in the contiguous United States is the furthest distance from a McDonald’s? Somewhere in South Dakota: “Between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley lies the McFarthest Spot: 107 miles distant from the nearest McDonald’s, as the crow flies, and 145 miles by car!”

This fun short video from Sheepfilms reminds me of the funny videos done about Google Earth and Street View a while back — they all intersect the map and the interface with reality.

Via Gadling.

Previously: The Vacationeers: Google My Maps Gets Spooky; Google Maps Street View Is Right Behind You; The Truth About Google Earth.

Doing exactly what your car’s GPS tells you to is not only not an excuse, it’s also not a legal defence. A 43-year-old British man who followed his GPS’s directions to the edge of a cliff earlier this year has been fined £370 for driving without due care and attention. The Daily Mail says that Robert Jones “is thought to be the first person punished for slavishly following a satnav’s orders.” With costs and penalties, the incident has cost him nearly £2,000. See also Chris Matyszczyk’s snark on CNet. Via All Points Blog.

Previously: Another British Case of Blindly Following Your GPS.

London mayor Boris Johnson to Transport for London: put the Thames and the fare zones back on the Tube map (see previous entry). They’ll return to the map’s next version, due in September.

Astronomy reports that the Planetary Science Institute has released “the first detailed maps that show the amount of dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) deposited in the polar regions of Mars. The maps reveal how the ice thickness varies with the seasons.” The maps were created from spectroscopy data taken by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft over two Martian years. (Image credit: Hubble Space Telescope images by JPL/NASA/STScI; maps by Thomas Prettyman of the Planetary Science Institute.)

Uh-oh. The latest version of the Tube map omits fare zones and the Thames. That controversy has ensued should come as no surprise to anyone who follows the mapping of the London Underground. (I expect that a parody based on a scene from Der Untergang will be along shortly.) With more changes to the network forthcoming, this map will only have a shelf life of a few months; it’ll be interesting to see if Transport for London keeps these changes or reverts to an older design. People can get very, very touchy about their subway/metro/underground maps. Via All Points Blog and Ed Parsons.

• An exhibition of Jedediah Hotchkiss’s Civil War maps is currently underway at the Library of Congress — in the corridor outside the Geography and Maps Reading Room at the James Madison Building, but it’s an exhibition nonetheless. Via MapHist.
• Running until September 26 at the Danish Royal Library, an “exciting” exhibition called Maps, Myths and Narratives: Cartography of the Far North. Via MAPS-L.
• At the Lawrenceville School’s Gruss Center of Visual Arts in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, an exhibition called Mapping the World, 1579-1889, displaying maps and atlases from the collection of an alumnus of the private boarding school; it runs until October 24.

The Times reports that the World Islands, an artificial archipelago of several hundred private islands in the shape of a world map being constructed off the coast of Dubai, has been, like so many other Dubai construction projects, cancelled: “Mile after mile of breakwater built from boulders brought hundreds of miles by ship has been laid, but inside its man-made lagoon, work has completely stopped. The expected map of the world of 300 islands is instead a disjointed and desolate collection of sandy blots — a monumental folly just out of sight of Dubai’s shore.” Via Gadling.

Previously: The World Islands.

Nikon’s GP-1 geotagger, which I reviewed here last March, has a USB port for connecting directly to a computer, but apparently the (Windows-only) driver had been delayed. It’s available now, though. Via Nikon Rumors.

Previously: Still Another Nikon GP-1 Review; Review: Nikon GP-1 GPS Unit; Nikon Digital SLR Geotagging Roundup; Another Nikon GP-1 Review; Nikon Geotagger Reviewed; Nikon’s Digital SLR Geotagger.

• Buy Nikon GP-1 GPS Unit at Amazon.com

Via Cartophilia: Dominic Episcopo’s United Steaks of America.

The Bing Maps Blog announces the release of MapPoint 2010, and goes through some of its new features.

Previously: MapPoint and Streets and Trips 2009.

• Buy Microsoft MapPoint 2010 at Amazon.com
• Buy Microsoft MapPoint 2010 with GPS Locator at Amazon.com

The University of Southern Maine’s Osher Map Library is holding a number of events on the third weekend of October to celebrate its grand reopening: on Friday, October 16, a lecture by John Hessler on Thoreau; on Saturday the 17th, a conference called New Directions in the Study of Early American Cartographies; on the Sunday, the official reopening. Via MapHist.

Western Illinois University librarian Linda Zellmer has compiled a list of state online atlases of various sorts, from online GIS to Google Maps mashups, and from general atlases to those limited to specific topics. Via MAPS-L.

So I was thinking that using a GPS with maps and turn-by-turn navigation on a bicycle might be interesting, but a lot of the biking GPSes I’ve seen (i.e., Garmin’s Edge series) seem to be interested in awful things like calories burned. I wondered if there was a way to attach a Garmin nüvi 255W, which I already have, to a bike’s handlebars. Since I wondered that aloud, on Twitter no less, I got a few responses (thank you), and did some further digging based on those tips.

Garmin’s handlebar mount for the nüvi series (Amazon) looks ideal, but it isn’t compatible with widescreen units like mine.

Three other mounts — the GA-Bike (Amazon) and the i.Trek Bike Mount and this one — look kind of flimsy: they use the clip-and-ball mount, which has a tendency to bounce loose in my Subaru on rough roads, never mind a bicycle. The reviews on Amazon tend to bear that out.

RAM mounts (pictured) aren’t explicitly marketed at cyclists, but it doesn’t look like we’re excluded either; they use a U-bolt — I don’t know how snugly that attaches — but otherwise looks sturdy. Here’s one for my unit.

I should have figured that there’d be more than a few options.

I’ve posted a number of maps showing U.S. unemployment rates, so I perked up when I saw that The Globe and Mail had an interactive unemployment map for Canada. Unfortunately, it’s terrible: it only shows the change in the unemployment rate from July to August; provinces are points rather than areas; the interactivity is limited to mouseovers; the colours are backward (red for dropping unemployment, green for growing, when you’d normally expect green to be good and red to be bad) and show change rather than level — a low unemployment rate that goes up a tenth of a point would be shown no differently than a high unemployment rate that goes up a full point. And then there’s the comma between the tens and the ones. Have that cartographer flogged immediately.