The interference currently affecting ships in and around the Strait of Hormuz is far from the first time that [maritime intelligence analyst Michelle Wise] Bockmann has observed GPS jamming impacting vessels’ Automatic Identification Systems (AIS).
The same thing happened in this region last year during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, and electronic interference has also troubled vessel navigators in the Baltic Sea. But, she says, “This is next-level.”
Here’s an example, ‘Colours and symbols used on fair sheets and fair tracing’, issued by the Hydrographic Office of the Navy in 1973. Fair here meaning a document after correction, ready to be used. But is it fair? With this ‘made-up’ map the Hydrographic Office have used real names but in random locations, so Campania, in reality a region of Italy, features, as does the English county of Rutland (though as a town here) and a made-up mountain, Montrosia. Best of all is mention of “Approaches to Valhalla”. The map shows different forms of landscape, both natural and man-made with the symbols used to show those features, and the names are added to give the whole an authentic feel.
It makes sense to do it this way: no single real map is likely to contain every single feature you’re trying to demonstrate.
This exhibition offers a historical and scientific journey through more than three centuries of research devoted to measuring, modeling and understanding the shape of our planet, from the 17th century through to the space age. Since ancient times, we’ve known that the Earth is, broadly speaking, a sphere. The key question was whether it was slightly flattened at the poles or elongated. To answer this question, scientists, astronomers, mathematicians and geodesists have developed theoretical models, designed innovative instruments and conducted vast observation campaigns around the world. The exhibition features exceptional sources drawn mainly from the collections of the Académie des Sciences and the Royal Society, testifying to the intensity of scientific exchanges between Paris and London and the decisive role of international cooperation in the production of knowledge.
France seems to have quite a lot of map-related programming lately.
GPS jamming has become pretty much endemic in every conflict, open, hybrid or frozen, so it’s no surprise that it’s going on in the Persian Gulf: “Though commercial vessels are not the target, the electronic interference disrupted the navigation systems of more than 1,100 commercial ships in UAE, Qatari, Omani and Iranian waters on February 28, according to a report from Windward, a shipping intelligence firm.” The CNN article goes on to explain why GPS (and other GNSS systems) are so vulnerable, and how spoofing and jamming have become so commonplace.
Bill Dollins reacts to Gary Gale’s experience with AI crawlers taking down his mapping project (previously), and what that portends for the open geospatial web. “On its own, this is a small incident. No critical infrastructure failed. No global service collapsed. It is, however, a revealing stress case. It shows how open geospatial infrastructure behaves when exposed to a new class of demand. That demand is continuous, automated, and indifferent to the social and economic assumptions that shaped the system in the first place. This is not an isolated story. It is an early signal of a broader shift already underway.”
Reuters: “South Korea will soon no longer be one of the few countries where Google Maps doesn’t work properly, after its security-conscious government reversed a two-decade stance to approve the export of high-precision map data to overseas servers.” Prior to this decision Google Maps had to use lower-resolution map data in South Korea because it was forbidden from storing South Korea’s high-resolution data on its own servers outside the country. Google will have to abide by certain restrictions, including blurring military and other sensitive facilities and disallowing lat/long coordinates on South Korean territory—South Korea really doesn’t want Google Maps to be used by a military adversary. [Tara Calishain]
I’m as much a fountain pen nerd as I am a map nerd, but I somehow only found out just now that Italian pen company Aurora has been releasing a collection of antique map-themed fountain pens. Each is named after a famous mapmaker, with five planned and two announced so far: the Tolomeo (i.e. Ptolemy) in 2024 and the Fra Mauro last year. Your guess is as good as mine as to who the next three will be named after. (The Aurora Instagram account seems to be the one to watch, as it’s more active than other channels.)
Only 680 of each are being made, so these are limited editions. The top and bottom finials represent an armillary and a compass rose, respectively; the trim is silver, the bodies are cellulose acetate, and the nib is 18k gold. The pens use a piston-filling mechanism.
These are not the first map-themed pens I’ve encountered, but they’re certainly the most expensive, with prices somewhere around 1,400 euros (VAT included) at the various online pen stores I’ve checked at. If they’re still in stock, that is.
Every so often Matthew Edney posts something that had to be cut from his work in progress. In this case it’s a piece about what he calls “the most amazing map exhibition ever mounted”: Cartes et figures de la terre, which ran at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1980.
The curators of Cartes et figures de la terre were not map specialists. The principal curator was Giulio Macchi (1918–2009), an Italian film maker and producer for Italian state television, who was also an experienced curator of art exhibitions. The large accompanying volume, of the same title as the exhibition, was edited by Jean-Loup Rivière (1948–2018), a playwright, director, and theater critic and theorist who was then a research fellow at the Centre Pompidou.
Neither Macchi nor Rivière were committed to established scholarly and professional attitudes towards maps and their history. Entranced by the great variety of scientific and artistic map images, both past and present, they emphasized the aesthetic form of maps rather than map content. In doing so, Macchi and Rivière challenged the seemingly eternal verities of the normative map, even as they remained bound to those verities, not least to the idea that all maps are somehow all the same and a necessarily exceptionalist form of representation. They were especially enamored of the spectacular and of the creative in mapping.
Among other things, they brought the Coronelli globes out of storage.
Quincy Morgan has released Pinhead Map Icons: “So you’re making a map and need some icons. Well, maybe a lot of icons. Like, for anything that might appear on a map. And they need to be visually consistent. Like the size and direction and whatever. And they gotta be free. Even public domain. In vector format. With no AI. Oh, and they all need to be legible on the head of a pin.” 1,045 icons and counting, in SVG format.
When it comes to books that present the maps of a single library or museum—take, for example, Debbie Hall’s Treasures from the Map Room, about the Bodleian, or Tom Harper’s Atlas: A World of Maps from the British Library—there seems to be a standard, curatorial template, one that focuses on full-colour reproductions of the maps, each of which is accompanied by a short explanatory text. The maps, as objects, are the point.
The Library of Lost Maps (Bloomsbury, 2025) is about the maps held in the Map Room of University of College London. But author James Cheshire is doing something quite different here. Partly this is because UCL is neither the Bodleian nor the British Library. Their holdings are not remotely similar. There’s no equivalent of the Gough Map or the Selden Map here; the maps are more modern (19th and 20th century) and less rare and singular. UCL’s Map Library was a working map library, used by its staff for teaching and research, rather than something more curatorial.
But what the maps at UCL do have is stories attached—about how they were made, and about how they came to be in UCL’s hands. The Library of Lost Maps is simultaneously a story of the early days of UCL and its role in broadening education in Britain, its role as a repository for so many maps being produced during the twentieth century’s bloodiest conflicts, and its uncertain future as that role of map repository is increasingly seen as obsolete.
Leonardo da Vinci’s authorship of this 1514 octant map of the world has been disputed over the years.
Miguel García Álvarez looks at the maps of Leonardo da Vinci. “Leonardo never wrote a treatise on geography, as Ptolemy did, but his understanding of the territory and the importance of finding effective ways to represent it was far ahead of his contemporaries. I could simply leave you with his collection of maps, and I guarantee you would be fascinated by their beauty. Instead, I am going to limit myself to just three and use them to illustrate how he achieved three crucial advances in the early 16th century that are fundamental to understanding the history of geography.”
Maps: Digital | Analogue is a one-day symposium from the Sunderland Collection, held in conjunction with the Bodleian Libraries, taking place on 26 February 2026. “Discover the secrets that digitisation can reveal about historical maps and atlases, explore the world of online gaming maps, learn about globes and conservation, and find out all about the colours and pigments used in early cartography.” Free registration, streamed and in-person at Oxford’s Weston Library.
