Month: May 2026

Review: This Way Up

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Cover art for This Way Up, a book by the Map Men Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman.

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.

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Paleolatitude

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Because of continental drift, the ground beneath your feet has occupied a different position on the Earth over the ages. Paleolatitude is a tool that shows the latitude of every location on earth was since the days of Pangaea. The Utrecht University news release explains why this matters:

Latitude determines the angle of the sun’s rays and thus also the local climate. Earth scientists who reconstruct the climate of the distant past from traces in rocks therefore need to know where those rocks were located at the time. And that is often not the same place as today, because the tectonic plates may have travelled considerable distances. For example, geoscientists from Utrecht are studying 245-million-year-old flora and fauna in Winterswijk (The Netherlands), which lived in an environment very similar to today’s Persian Gulf: desert and tropical sea. Is that because global climate was so much warmer back then? Or was the Netherlands situated at the same latitude as Arabia? Six years ago, they had already demonstrated that the latter was the case.

For example, according to Paleolatitude my location (45°N) has held more or less the same latitude since the Cretaceous, but in the Carboniferous it was south of the equator. PLOS One article. [Tara Calishain]