Instead of scientists trawling to try to catch small and agile forage fish themselves, they’ve partnered with local anglers like Hackinen who are catching the salmon that are eating the small fish.
The Salish Sea is the inland sea between Vancouver Island, mainland British Columbia and Washington state. Its forage fish include Pacific herring, Pacific sand lance, northern anchovy, lantern fish and tiny shrimp and crustaceans.
To support the study, known as the Adult Salmon Diet Program, local anglers recorded data about their daily chinook and coho catches before sending scientists the fish’s guts.
Wired: “Satellite technology is being used to streamline rescue efforts in Venezuela following the two earthquakes that struck on June 24. Space agencies have shared images with emergency authorities and the Venezuelan government that not only reveal the magnitude of the disaster but also allow response teams to identify where to focus their efforts—and the challenges on the ground.”
In the summer of 1775, shortly after George Washington took charge of the newly formed Continental Army in Boston, a small advertisement appeared in the London newspapers, announcing the publication of The American Atlas: Or, A Geographical Description of the Whole Continent of America. The volume—which bore the name of the late Thomas Jefferys, who had held the title of Geographer to the King—promised a view of the continent’s “several Regions, Countries, States, and Islands, and chiefly the BRITISH COLONIES.”
The atlas was designed to capitalize on public interest in the “rebellion,” as King George III would call it in an August 1775 proclamation. Through the war, the well-to-do English reader with two pounds, twelve shilling and six pence to spare could follow news from this faraway land across a series of maps. (In editions published in subsequent years, the maps even included descriptions of Britain’s tactical victories, such as at the Battle of Valcour Island in Lake Champlain.)
Apple’s operating system upgrades this year seem to be focusing on scores of small improvements along with a ton of AI integrations so it’s no surprise that announced upgrades to Apple Maps in iOS/iPadOS/macOS 27 are in that vein: small improvements, plus AI integration (e.g. enhanced Flyover imagery). Details at Cult of Mac and Mac Observer, among others.
Bodleian Map Room Blog: “In early September one of the library treasures, the Oxfordshire Sheldon tapestry, will be taken off display. One of a set of four there’s been a Sheldon tapestry on display in Blackwell Hall for the last ten years, a riot of colour and history which has drawn visitors to them and will be missed when no longer there.” One of four tapestry maps of English counties commissioned in the late 16th century by Ralph Sheldon, the Oxfordshire tapestry went on display at the Bodleian in 2019, replacing a display of the Worcestershire tapestry. I assume it’s coming down for conservation reasons (they don’t say); no word either on what will take its place.
Jerry’s Map is still going strong. For decades, Jerry Gretzinger has been creating a map made up of thousands of individual paper tiles that are created, revised and even painted over based on an arcane, cards-based system of rules. He first came to our attention in 2009, thanks to Greg Whitmore’s short film, “Jerry’s Map.” People Make Games have just released a 47-minute documentary film in which we are reintroduced to Jerry, now in his eighties and still working on the map; the film shows the entire 4,100-tile map being assembled over a three-day period, which is something to see. (You should absolutely watch “Jerry’s Map” first, though.) [MetaFilter]
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.
