The Map Room

Another year, another Icelandic volcano with a difficult-to-pronounce name. Here’s Earth Observatory’s satellite image of Grímsvötn’s ash cloud (above) and Ogle Earth’s post about visualizing said ash cloud in Google Earth. Here’s an ESA article on the ash plume that includes animations of its spread (via GIS Lounge).

A new geoid model has been released by the GOCE satellite mission. Included in the release is an animated geoid model. A geoid is a gravity map of the earth that compensates for ocean currents and variations in sea level.

Previously: GOCE Satellite Maps Earth’s Gravity.

Daniel Huffman, author of the Cartastrophe blog about bad map design and — more recently — the map of profanity on Twitter, not only has a new blog called somethingaboutmaps, but his most recent mapping project is a series of maps of river systems done in the style of diagrammatic transit maps — for example, the map of the Mississippi River system, above. Via @axismaps, @beyondmaps and Cartogrammar.

Previously: Cartastrophe, a Blog About Bad Maps; Mapping Profanity on Twitter.

io9 has produced a map of the world’s natural disaster hot zones. “Most of the disasters we’ve highlighted here are caused by nature, and only occasionally helped along by humans. … How did we decide where disaster hot zones were? By looking at previous incidents of disaster in a given region, as well as places where fault lines and giant gobs of magma wait under the Earth for the perfect time to spew. Of course these kinds of forward-looking statements are subject to change.”

Mobile versions of Google Earth now have bathymetric and other ocean data: it came with Google Earth 1.1 for Android last month and Google Earth 3.1 for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad today.

The GOCE satellite has produced a highly detailed map of the variations in the Earth’s gravity field. It shows the difference between the regular ellipsoid shape that is used to represent the Earth’s shape and the geoid — a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA and the European Space Agency have each posted same-day satellite imagery of the ash plume from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano: NASA from the MODIS instrument aboard its Terra satellite, the ESA from Envisat (at right). Previously: Earth Observatory and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has posted a lot of images of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption; handily, there’s an index. Previously: Eyjafjallajökull and European Airspace; Eyjafjallajökull….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Norwegian Meteorological Office has put together a time-lapse animation showing the spread of the ash cloud emitted by the Eyjafjallajökull volcano. I’ve converted it from the original animated GIF, which is nearly 14 MB, and uploaded it here….  •  Continue reading this entry.

There are satellite images of the ash clouds thrown up by the eruption of the volcano under Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull glacier; the one above, captured by NASA’s Terra satellite on Wednesday, shows the ash plume following a straight line from…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Recent updates to Google Earth include higher-resolution underwater terrain data for some parts of the ocean floor and historical aerial photography taken over European cities during the Second World War….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Altitude on maps is given using sea level as a baseline. But sea level is not a constant, NASA/JPL oceanographer Josh Willis explains: “Even though it’s sometimes convenient to think of the ocean as a great big bathtub, where turning…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Odd and a bit horrific: a NOAA survey vessel mapping the ocean floor off the coast of California struck and killed a 21-metre female blue whale on October 19. (The endangered blue whale is the largest animal species ever known…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The USGS has released a map of the lower 48 United States showing its “standardized” terrestrial ecosystems. An interactive version is online here. The methodology behind the map is discussed in this article. From the press release: Featuring higher…  •  Continue reading this entry.

An online version of the Geologic Atlas of Texas has been made available by the Texas Water Development Board. Nothing fancy: just a Flash-based interface to scans of the 1:250,000-scale paper maps, but scans of paper maps will do…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Geological Survey of Canada has produced a geological map of the Arctic; the map is available in several formats online and will be published in print next year. Agence France-Press reports that the map is the result of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Earth 5.0 was released today, with a bunch of new features. The ocean layers were not unexpected: ocean floor bathymetry was released a couple of weeks ago (see Stefan’s critique), and the previously announced presence of Sylvia Earle…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In October, UNESCO released a global groundwater map highlighting underwater aquifers that straddle international boundaries, to coinicde with the submission to the UN General Assembly of a draft Convention on Transboundary Aquifers. The map is available for download as…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Brooks Rowlett points to this BBC News article about the OneGeology project, an initiative to make accessible online geological map data from the entire planet. This sounded familiar, like I’d heard about it before, but apparently I never got around…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The European Digital Archive of Soil Maps collects old soil maps from countries around the world, with a view to preserving them for later conversion into digital format. The archive is absolutely huge: it covers every inhabited continent. Special…  •  Continue reading this entry.

From the Times’s career section, an article featuring two people working in the cartography field: Jon Ford, a survey geologist with the British Geological Survey, and Edward Mainwaring, a cartographer with the Ordnance Survey….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A map of the human impact on global marine ecosystems has been published in today’s issue of Science; it reveals that only four percent of the world’s oceans have not been affected by human activity. Matt Perry was part…  •  Continue reading this entry.

At the Boston Public Library’s Copley Square through June, Boston and Beyond, a collection of bird’s-eye-view maps of Boston and New England from the second half of the 19th century. At Harvard University’s Pusey Library until April 1, Henry F….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The West Texas Geological Society is running a project to put a large geologic map of the United States into every elementary school in Midland and Odessa, Texas — a project apparently based on another in Corpus Christi. Via All…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology has released a new Geologic Map of Montana, the first since 1955. The four-foot-by-seven-foot map costs $60 in plain paper and $85 in glossy paper. More from the Billings Gazette….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The BBC reports on the recently released World Digital Magnetic Anomaly Map, which measures the slight variations in the Earth’s magnetic field. The map, available through the Commission for the Geological Map of the World, is a compilation from…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A recent National Science Foundation report discusses what should be done to explore and preserve a system of lakes and rivers beneath the Antarctic ice cap; of interest to us is this map of that system. Ice-penetrating radar and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Matt Fox, who georectified the Great Salt Lake bathymetric maps for use as Google Earth overlays, has made available his entire collection of maps through a Google Earth network link. The collection includes topo maps of the western U.S.,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A $1-million project to map the terrain of Portland, Oregon will take place over the next few weeks, the Oregonian reports. The aerial LIDAR survey is intended to create a hyper-accurate terrain map that will be particularly useful in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

BibliOdyssey’s latest map-related find is Jean-Étienne Guettard’s Atlas et description minéralogiques de la France (1780), digitized and available online at the University of Strasbourg, where, peacay notes, “maps start on page 223 … the full maps at the site…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The New York Times Magazine’s year-end retrospective on deaths of notable people in 2006 includes a profile of Marie Tharp, the oceanographic cartographer who died earlier this year (see previous entry). David Tiley places her career struggles in context:…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Missed this earlier. Google Earth’s time animation feature is now part of the free version, and Google Earth user Valery Hronusov has taken global paleogeographic data put out by geology professor Ron Blakey — whom we last met thanks…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Ohio Geological Survey has announced a 1:500,000-scale map of the state’s bedrock geology: “The map shows the distribution of 46 bedrock formations or combinations of formations occurring at the surface or immediately beneath the surficial deposits (mostly glacial)…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A four-year study of Hudson Canyon, a feature of the continental shelf off the coast of New York, “has produced maps that will allow scientists to study many things, including whether methane gas trapped in frozen sediment below the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Columbia University reports the death yesterday of Marie Tharp, an oceanographic cartographer who worked on the first world map of the ocean floor; she also co-discovered the Mid-Atlantic Ridge’s rift valley. She was 86. A pioneer of modern oceanography,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

BLDGBLOG’s been having fun with images from NASA’s Earth Observatory again (see previous entry), linking to this collection of MODIS images of Africa during 2005, showing the occurrence of fires deliberately set by people as part of their agricultural…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The USGS’s San Francisco Bay Region Geology and Geologic Hazards page has a lot going for it, mapwise. No surprise that much of it has to do with earthquake risks. There are three main sections: geologic maps compiled from several…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via Cartography, a stunning collection of maps depicting the paleogeography of North America. The images presented here show the paleogeography of North America over the last 550 million years of geologic history. The 40 images shown here are selected from…  •  Continue reading this entry.