Out this week: Little Blue Dot: How the Global Positioning System Shaped the Modern World by Katherine Dunn. From the publishers’ descriptions (plural: it’s out from Bloomsbury in the U.S. and HarperCollins imprint Mudlark in the U.K.), it functions as a history of GPS, a look at its impact, and a warning about its vulnerabilities. The Walrus has published an excerpt, titled “How to Hack a Superyacht,” that explores the rise of GPS spoofing (which is using a device to replace the weak GPS satellite signal with one that gives false location data, as opposed to GPS jamming, which blocks the signal altogether—spoofing, Dunn says, is worse than jamming).
Cartes imaginaires: Inventer des mondes, an exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France running from 24 March to 19 July 2026, explores maps of the imaginary, the legendary and the literary from medieval to modern times. A symposium this past April on maps and popular culture was held in conjunction with this exhibition, but I somehow missed reporting on the exhibition itself. Fortunately, Surekha Davies has attended it, and has this report: “I went around this show a couple of times with different friends. From Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth to a map of Guiana derived from Sir Walter Ralegh’s travel narrative about the region, it felt at times like the library had put this show on specially for me!”
(Though she disagrees with placing sea monsters in the same category as fantasy maps: she argues that they’re a representation of the hidden, inaccessible or strange, not the fanciful. On which she points to her 2020 essay in Aeon, which is worth reading.)
GPS jamming has come to space. Researchers have identified a Russian satellite as the source of 10-second radio bursts that have been disrupting GNSS signals.
Occasional bursts of energy from a Russian missile-detection satellite have been briefly disrupting satellite navigation across large parts of Europe, a pattern that may indicate a “qualitative escalation in GNSS [global navigation satellite system] interference.”
At least 75 times between 2019 and 2026, University of Texasresearchers observed 10-second bursts of high-powered radio signals at 1558.5 MHz: the frequency used by GPS and European navigation satellites to transmit signals to Earth. The bursts disrupted GPS antennas from Romania to Greenland, the researchers write in a paper published this month in the journal Navigation.
Haye Kesteloo reports at DroneXL: “Hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players spent years filming the streets, parks, and buildings around them to earn in-game rewards. Those roughly 30 billion environmental scans are now owned by Niantic Spatial, and they helped train a camera-based navigation model that a U.S. defense contractor is preparing to put into drones and other military robots. Most of the players had no idea.” The data is being used for a visual navigation system (VPS) that can operate even when GPS signals are jammed or otherwise unavailable.
[Warning: The linked page is extremely resource intensive, eating up 6-7 GB of RAM on my machine, which is pure nonsense for a web article.]
An exonym is a place name used by outsiders—for example, English speakers using Germany for Deutschland. The Exonym Atlas explores how other languages name countries and groups those names by usage. Fascinating to see the derivations of names, which don’t always follow language families: for example, the Latin Germania gets picked up by English, Greek, Italian and Russian, variants on Allemagne (French) turn up in Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic, and the Slavic-in-origin Niemcy (Polish) gets picked up by Hungarian but not Russian or Bulgarian. [r/etymologymaps]
It’s been more than a year since I last posted about the “Gulf of America” nonsense, but here’s something new to share: a video from World Maps Online in which Paul explains why his maps still call it the Gulf of Mexico—patiently, to online commenters who are giving him grief about it—as well as the long history of bodies of water having different names depending on who’s doing the naming. For all the political charge of this topic, it’s an effective explainer that goes out of its way to shed far more light than heat.
There so much fantastic material that has already been written about Tharp and her legacy (I’ve listed some at the end), but nowhere have I found the most significant maps she helped to create gathered in one place.
So I have created a chronology of these ocean floor maps to show how they became some of the most well-known and influential maps of the twentieth century. I know there are a few I’ve missed that are in National Geographic atlases and on globes, but the fifteen below show the most comprehensive evolution of the ocean floor mapping work I’ve found to date.
In this book, award-winning journalist Peter Keating has assembled dozens of the most significant maps in history. There is the map featuring the Treaty of Tordesillas meridian, which Spain and Portugal used to divide the whole of the Western Hemisphere in 1494. The map deployed by Western leaders at the 1884 Berlin Conference to carve up Africa. A map of Adolf Hitler’s speaking engagements in 1933 that looks like a rock concert tour poster. Maps of gerrymandering. Of redlining. Of military targets and of peace treaties. The map of the world—distortions and all—that hangs on thousands of classroom walls. And the polarizing red-and-blue election results maps that Americans are confronted with every two years. In striking images and riveting stories that span continents and centuries, Keating makes a compelling case for why, in the age of the internet, the power of maps—to define borders, to influence social policy, to enact political change—is unmatched, and is as potent as ever before.
A collaboration between the California Geological Survey and the USGS, the Sierra Nevada Earth Science Atlas “provides the most detailed geologic framework mapping of California’s most iconic landscape to date. This web page hosts the numerous maps, data layers, and an associated report that make up the Atlas. Collectively, these layers and report show and describe the geology of the Sierra Nevada, a prominent mountain range that extends roughly north-south across eastern California and into a small portion of western Nevada, along with adjacent areas.” At the moment the Atlas consists of a geologic map plus appendices, along with a data package containing a number of map layers, with more to be added in the future.
In a blog post, David Smith discusses the challenges of getting good maps on the Apple Watch version of Pedometer++, version 8 of which shipped last month. “App design on watchOS is a really fun—but frustrating—challenge. You are designing for a relatively tiny screen, which must be operated one-handed. In this case, I want the user to be able to read the map and use it to navigate, while also having access to other workout-related information.” It involved years of iterative design, and a cartographer hired to create a custom base map layer.
Covering four distinct categories (“The Making of Boston,” “The Lay of the Land,” “Getting Around,” and “People and Culture” ), Andy Woodruff’s newly created, original maps investigate all facets of Boston’s past and present. In unraveling the many complex layers that comprise the “real” Boston, some explorations are expected: sports championships, universities, and pothole complaints. Others, such as the former cow paths that predated downtown streets, are decidedly more hidden.
Dig into the city’s history with a guided tour through Revolutionary War sites, landmarks of nineteenth-century Black Boston, and notable “first in the nation” events (like the first recorded UFO sighting). Uncover the structural forces that shaped the social and lived experience of Boston, with maps showing the impact of redlining, urban renewal practices, and the busing crisis of the 1970s. Discover how the city’s boundaries evolved through annexation and landfill and how they’ll continue to change due to coastal flooding risks. Explore some of Boston’s most unique quirks through surprising revelations about the density of Dunkin’ locations, the distinctive architecture of three-deckers, and the spread of the infamous Great Molasses Flood.
Andy previously co-authored the Bostonography site with Tim Wallace; in his page about his book he talks about what carried over from that project (only a few, actually) and what was new. Andy’s other work has been featured here several times before: start here.
Geoawesome’s Aleks Buczkowski looks at the art of Ed Fairburn, who combines portraiture with maps—basically, maps with a human face. “Fairburn’s work sits at the intersection of cartography and portraiture. It reminds us that maps are not just representations of space. They can also tell stories about people, identity, and place.” I covered Fairburn and his work back in February 2016.
It’s been ten years since Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman teamed up to form Voltron launch an occasional and irregular series of videos about maps. They called themselves the Avengers Map Men, and in each episode, sandwiched between the catchy theme song1 and the long ad break for Surfshark, they took as their subject an odd map or cartographic situation and proceeded to say a lot of smart things in a very silly fashion.
Now those videos have led to a book, This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (and Why It Matters), which came out last fall to no small amount of fanfare and promotion, and we get to see whether the schtick that works on YouTube is translatable to the printed page. It turns out that the answer is, kind of.
