John Nelson has found another analog map style to replicate in ArcGIS Pro: Heinrich Berann’s iconic National Geographic maps of the ocean floor (which were paintings based on the work of Marie Tharp and Bruce Heezen). Direct link to the video tutorial.
The current U.S. administration’s map vandalism isn’t limited to a certain international body of water. Maps Mania reports that FEMA’s online flood and risk maps have gone offline as part of the ongoing purge of everything related to climate change. One map, the Future Risk Index, has been salvaged by independent engineers.
A conference next month on current research on the Tabula Peutingeriana, a 13th-century copy of what is supposed to be a 4th- or 5th-century diagram of the Roman road network. That research includes UV imaging to draw out inscriptions that may have faded over the centuries (another example) and linguistic analyses to determine the provenance of the inscriptions (are they copied from the original or contemporary to the copy)? Page in German, conference in Germany.
There’s talk of ads coming to Apple Maps—at least, Apple is said to be exploring the possibility—which, online consternation notwithstanding, is something Google has had forever—when you get right down to it, Google Maps was a way to provide location based search results, and search results were always monetized with ads. Apple started out using its services as loss leaders for its pricey hardware products; now those services are expected to make money themselves.
When not getting into trouble over which name of a certain international body of water to show to which users, Google continues to turn out smaller updates around the corners of their map services. No seriously, the corners: they’re more rounded in the Google Maps app now. Also, Google Maps supports Android’s Live Updates, viz., your ETA shows up in the status bar (which I admit is neat).
We interrupt The Map Room for a pledge break.
As you may know, I’ve wanted The Map Room to go ad-free for some time. But much as I’d like to get rid of them, Google ads represent something like 60 percent of my website revenue. I launched a Patreon page last year, and I’m deeply gratified by the support I’ve received from my subscribers, but to replace my ad revenue I need there to be more of you.
So I’m launching a campaign this month. Here’s what’s happening:
I’m deactivating Google ads for the entire month of March. If enough new people join my Patreon as paid members by the end of the month, the ads will stay off for good. The goal is to reach a total of 22 paid members by March 31—The Map Room’s 22nd anniversary. That number would represent roughly what I’ve been making, on average, from Google ads in recent years—an admittedly modest amount, but it would enable me to walk away from the ad ecosystem completely and still pay the bills.
Continue reading “Membership Drive”On Friday the Associated Press sued three White House officials on First and Fifth Amendment grounds, calling the White House’s barring of AP reporters from the Oval Office and Air Force One for refusing to adopt the “Gulf of America” moniker for the Gulf of Mexico. The AP is calling the White House’s action an unconstitutional retaliation against protected free speech: “The press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government.” I spotted a copy of the complaint (PDF) on PetaPixel.
Update, 25 Feb: A federal judge denied the AP’s request for emergency relief on Monday, citing the lack of irreparable harm, and set a hearing for March 20. The judge, a Trump appointee, did describe the ban as “discriminatory” and “problematic.” BBC News, CNN.
Previously: Naming the Gulf; Google Maps to Use ‘Gulf of America’–Others Not So Much; More Reactions to ‘Gulf of America’; Google and the Gulf; ‘Gulf of America’: Apple Conforms, AP Punished for Not Doing So; ‘Gulf of America’ Isn’t Going Over Well; Is ‘Gulf of Mexico’ Worth Fighting For?; ‘Gulf of America’: Compliance and Resistance; A ‘Gulf of America’ Roundup.
Two long reads on Apple, Google and the Gulf of America nonsense. Miguel García looks the history of places with multiple names, and how Google Maps in particular has handled them, using the Matterhorn (Mont Cervin, Monte Cervino) as an uncontentious example. John Gruber, whose Daring Fireball blog has covered the Apple side of the tech world for more than two decades, has a bracing, no-punches-pulled take that covers the utter lunacy of the name change, Google’s and Apple’s history of obeisance to autocratic regimes and the excessive compliance involved in showing “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)” to the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, even Fox News and Newsmax are among the 40 news organizations who’ve signed on to a White House Correspondents Association letter protesting the White House’s blacklisting of the Associated Press for refusing to comply with the “Gulf of America” edict.
Previously: Naming the Gulf; Google Maps to Use ‘Gulf of America’–Others Not So Much; More Reactions to ‘Gulf of America’; Google and the Gulf; ‘Gulf of America’: Apple Conforms, AP Punished for Not Doing So; ‘Gulf of America’ Isn’t Going Over Well; Is ‘Gulf of Mexico’ Worth Fighting For?; ‘Gulf of America’: Compliance and Resistance.
On the ArcGIS Blog, a guide by Stephanie Oliver to designing maps that are more accessible to readers with colour blindness. (This is very specifically an ArcGIS Pro guide, down to the palette menus.)
While it was reported that Apple would comply with the “Gulf of America” renaming, I wasn’t sure what Apple would do outside the U.S.; now it appears that it will follow Google’s lead and show both names. Above is what I see in Canada; I wonder what Apple is showing Mexican users.
Meanwhile, Axios, citing its mainly U.S. audience, is adopting “Gulf of America” (HuffPost, The Hill, The Wrap) but had this to say about the White House blacklisting the Associated Press: “At the same time, the government should never dictate how any news organization makes editorial decisions. The AP and all news organizations should be free to report as they see fit. This is a bedrock of a free press and durable democracy.”
The name change is broadly unpopular and people are finding ways to resist it. If “Gulf of America” becomes a way to signal compliance with the regime, it looks like “Gulf of Mexico,” even on a t-shirt (which I’ve seen already), will signal noncompliance.
Bryce Bostwick has released a Chrome extension that restores “Gulf of Mexico” to Google Maps. As he says, “There are a lot of scary executive orders being issued right now. This is not one of the most important ones. But it might be the easiest to defy.” This apparently took some reverse engineering, as he explains in a 24-minute video.
MapQuest—remember MapQuest?—has not as yet complied with the Trump executive order; in fact, they’ve decided to have some fun with it, with a tongue-in-cheek tool that allows you to rename the Gulf yourself.
Previously: Naming the Gulf; Google Maps to Use ‘Gulf of America’–Others Not So Much; More Reactions to ‘Gulf of America’; Google and the Gulf; ‘Gulf of America’: Apple Conforms, AP Punished for Not Doing So; ‘Gulf of America’ Isn’t Going Over Well; Is ‘Gulf of Mexico’ Worth Fighting For?
The Associated Press is now banned from the Oval Office and Air Force One indefinitely for refusing to toe the Trump line on “Gulf of America.” The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple thinks this is a hill worth dying on: “On this particular hill, we have the freedom to make editorial choices without government intervention and manipulation.” On the other hand, The Atlantic’s Gilad Edelman thinks this was the wrong fight to pick: “A huge share of Trump’s actions over the past four weeks fall somewhere on the spectrum from ‘legally questionable’ to ‘plainly unconstitutional.’ The ‘Gulf of America’ rebrand is not one of them.”
Making you make me shows everyone who you are. There’s something to be said for that.
Previously: Naming the Gulf; Google Maps to Use ‘Gulf of America’–Others Not So Much; More Reactions to ‘Gulf of America’; Google and the Gulf; ‘Gulf of America’: Apple Conforms, AP Punished for Not Doing So; ‘Gulf of America’ Isn’t Going Over Well.
Nearly 20 years ago, James Fee launched Planet Geospatial, which aggregated all the GIS, geospatial and map blogs into a single feed. It’s been gone for a while, and recently Bill Dollings messaged James about bringing something like it back. As Bill writes,
Blogs (and I’ll lump Substack into that category) are where the good stuff happens, but they are so scattered in 2025. The simple act of aggregating a bunch of blogs into a single feed that I could point an RSS reader to was incredible informative during my early/mid career. James doesn’t get enough credit for the multi-year labor of love that was Planet Geospatial.
Enter GeoFeeds, “a single, unified feed-of-feeds from geo-related/adjacent blogs, acting as a one-stop shop of content.” There are both HTML and RSS versions, plus a list of included blogs (yrs trly included).
Update 15 Feb: New URL at geofeeds.me. Links updated.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted 24-26 January found that 70 percent of Americans oppose renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America; only 25 percent support the move.
Google Maps users have been leaving one-star reviews of the Gulf to protest Google’s compliance with the renaming; Google has deleted the reviews and prevented new reviews from being posted. (Users are also review-bombing the Google Maps app itself.) That’s far from Google’s only problem: Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum said today that her government was weighing a lawsuit against Google over the change (AP, Politico).
Meanwhile, the White House continues to punish the Associated Press by denying Oval Office access, and the AP is considering legal action on First Amendment grounds (CNN, NPR, Politico). The AP’s own story hints at one issue: a lot of news organizations follow the AP style, and cowing the AP into submission kills a lot of birds with one stone. In addition, the New York Times and Washington Post say they’ll continue using Gulf of Mexico.
Bloomberg’s Linda Poon provides some history and context to the change and to the renaming process in general, and has quotes from Mark Monmonier and representatives from Rand McNally and TomTom—because the tech giants aren’t the only ones making maps.
Writing for The Atlantic, David Frum sees the renaming of the Gulf as a sign of weakness.
In the age of discovery and conquest, European mariners often named bodies of water after the destination territory on the other side of that water. The Gulf of Mexico is so called because when a Spaniard sailed toward Mexico, the Gulf was the sea that the Spaniard crossed.
Once you understand this practice, you see it everywhere. […]
Bodies of water are typically named by dominant nations not after themselves, but after the subordinate nations on the other side. To rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America” is to reconceptualize the United States not as a sending point, but as a receiving point; no longer a country that stamps itself upon history, but a country upon which history is stamped.
Previously: Naming the Gulf; Google Maps to Use ‘Gulf of America’–Others Not So Much; More Reactions to ‘Gulf of America’; Google and the Gulf; ‘Gulf of America’: Apple Conforms, AP Punished for Not Doing So.
Google isn’t alone: Apple is also changing Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America to its maps. According to Bloomberg, the change is happening today for U.S. users and rolling out globally later, which if true is a lot more compliance than Google is showing. AppleInsider, TechCrunch, The Verge.
Apple and Google are changing their maps despite being legally required to do so, at least according to a report from the Congressional Research service (via Engadget):
BGN decisions are not required to be adopted for nonfederal domestic publications. For decades, the Alaska State government has used “Denali” in place of “Mount McKinley” on state publications and maps. The E.O. would not mandate changes to the usage of “Denali” by the State of Alaska. Similarly, the E.O. would not require private company applications, such as Google Maps and Apple Maps, to adopt the changed names. Nonfederal entities may choose to adopt BGN naming conventions moving forward.
That they’re doing so can be explained easily enough: fear of retaliation. Something the Associated Press discovered today: they announced last month that they’d continue using “Gulf of Mexico,” citing their global role and reach. From an AP statement today:
Today we were informed by the White House that if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office. This afternoon AP’s reporter was blocked from attending an executive order signing.
It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism. Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment.
As I wrote when this first went down: “‘Gulf of America’ is basically a loyalty test—a MAGA shibboleth.” The point is seeing who obeys—and who doesn’t.
Previously: Naming the Gulf; Google Maps to Use ‘Gulf of America’–Others Not So Much; More Reactions to ‘Gulf of America’; Google and the Gulf.
For the past decade, Reynold Mackey of Paranneaux Globes has been sculpting physiographic globes from materials like wood and bronze. There’s not a whole lot of information on his website, a bit more on the Instagram account, but a lot of detail about his methods emerges in his conversation with Evan Applegate on the Very Expensive Maps podcast (episode link: Apple Podcasts, Spotify).
