Category: Surveying

Mapping Without a Licence

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

An odd story out of California, reported on by Vice’s Chloe Xiang, from earlier this month. Ryan Crownholm’s website, MySitePlan.com, sells residential and commercial site plans. California’s Board for Professional Engineers, Land Surveyors, and Geologists has fined him $1,000 for practising land surveying without a licence and ordered him to shut down the site. He’s fighting the citation in court with the assistance of the libertarian Institute for Justice: see their page on the complaint. Their argument is that California surveying laws are vague enough that a literal interpretation would make any map drawn in California, no matter how informal or non-authoritative, illegal.

It’s unlikely to say the least that the Board intends to ban Google Maps or every California-based instance of GIS. This is an edge case. Crownholm’s defence turns on his drawings being “non-authoritative” and a disclaimer that these are not legal surveys. The Board apparently thinks that’s insufficient. A spot of litigation seems required to clarify things.

The Impact of NOAA’s Height Modernization Program

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
The New York Times (Jonathan Corum), based on NOAA and NGS data

Last month the New York Times covered a subject that you’d expect to be too technical for the general reader: NOAA’s efforts to recalibrate elevation data as part of its update to the National Spatial Reference System, expected in 2022 or 2023. The height modernization program corrects local elevation data—which was last updated in 1988—by using GPS and gravity mapping. The Times article looks at the real-world implications of this effort, which will have the greatest impact the further west and north you go (see map above), from bragging rights about mountain elevation to whether your community is in a floodplain. [MAPS-L]

Previously: NATRF2022 Datum Coming to North America in 2022.

Inō Tadataka, Surveyor of Japan

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
National Diet Library

Britain had the Ordnance Survey, France the Cassini family. Japan had Inō Tadataka (伊能 忠敬, 1745-1818), who over a series of expeditions in the early 19th century conducted a systematic survey of Japan using modern techniques. Writing for Nippon.com, Inō’s biographer, Hoshino Yoshihisa, writes a long introduction to Inō’s life and work that is well worth the read. [Tony Campbell]

For more on the history of Japanese cartography, see Cartographic Japan, a collection of academic essays edited by Kären Wigen, Sugimoto Fumiko and Cary Karacas that was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2016.

The Secret Mission to Seize German Map Data in World War II

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Greg Miller’s crackerjack story in the November 2019 issue of Smithsonian magazine is about the quest to capture German geodetic data—and German geographers—during the dying days of the Second World War. Said data was a strategically critical treasure trove, of immense interest to the U.S. War Department, and the team led by Floyd W. Hough was in a race to find it before it was destroyed, carried away by the enemy, or fell into Soviet hands.

Little is publicly known about the true scope of the information that Hough and his team captured, or the ingenuity they displayed in securing it, because their mission was conducted in secret, and the technical material they seized circulated only among military intelligence experts and academics. But it was a vast scientific treasure—likely the largest cache of geographic data the United States ever obtained from an enemy power in wartime.

The data seized by Hough’s team went on to form the basis of the ED50 geodetic datum, which in turn led to the Universal Tranverse Mercator system.

Monmonier’s Latest: Connections and Content

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Mark Monmonier’s latest book, Connections and Content: Reflections on Networks and the History of Cartography (Esri Press, August ebook/September paperback) is about “the relationships between networks and maps”—what does that mean? Apparently: triangulation networks, postal networks, telegraph networks survey networks, astronomical observations and other underlying data. Steven Seegel interviews Monmonier about the book for the New Books in Geography podcast. [Amazon]

Antarctica at Eight-Metre Resolution

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica (map poster)

The Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica is a terrain map of nearly the entire continent at eight-metre resolution, assembled from observations from polar-orbiting satellites (mostly in 2015 and 2016). Version 1 covers 98 percent of Antarctica, and observations are ongoing. Notably, each grid point is timestamped, which will allow researchers to track changes over time (useful when your continent is melting). Raw data is available for download, as are map posters; the data is also available via web apps. [Geographical]

The BBC on the Ordnance Survey

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Speaking of the Ordnance Survey, here’s a potted history of the OS from the BBC’s Bethan Bell. The definitive history, of course, is Rachel Hewitt’s Map of a Nation (2010), which I reviewed in 2012, but it only covers the first century or so. Bell’s piece is full of factoids—scattershot, random access—from both the 19th and 20th centuries. [A-Z Maps]

Mapping Denali in Detail

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Matt Nolan and his family have created a topographic map of Denali, the highest peak in North America, using a form of stereo photogrammetry Nolan calls fodar: they repeatedly overflew the peak in a small airplane and took photos of the terrain below with a digital SLR. The end result is a 20-cm terrain model they’re touting as the best ever of the mountain, far more detailed than previous maps. Nolan outlines their endeavour in two blog posts: one focusing on the personal, the other on the technical; the latter also has lots of terrain models and comparisons with USGS data.

He’s also running a crowdfunding campaign to underwrite the costs of additional map flights. [WMS]

LIDAR Mapping Reveals a Far Greater Mayan Civilization

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A 2016 aerial survey of ten sites in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve used LIDAR to digitally remove the tree canopy from the landscape, revealing, National Geographic reports, “the ruins of a sprawling pre-Columbian civilization that was far more complex and interconnected than most Maya specialists had supposed”—and one that likely supported a much higher population than previously thought. The survey and its findings are the subject of a documentary special premiering tomorrow on the National Geographic channel. More coverage: CBC News, The New York Times, The Verge, The Washington Post.

Early Radar Maps of Antarctica Digitized

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Nature: “Glaciologists will soon have a treasure trove of data for exploring how Antarctica’s underbelly has changed over nearly half a century. An international team of researchers has scanned and digitized 2 million records from pioneering aeroplane radar expeditions that criss-crossed the frozen continent in the 1960s and 1970s. […] The digitized data extend the record of changes at the bottom of the ice sheet, such as the formation of channels as Antarctica’s ice flows, by more than two decades.” (Modern radar mapping of Antarctica apparently only began in the 1990s.) [WMS]

British Antarctic Survey Remeasures Mount Hope

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Mount Hope, 18 March 2004. Photo by Euphro. Creative Commons licence.

This BBC News article leads with a reasonably interesting geographic fact: that Mount Hope, on the Antarctic Peninsula, has been remeasured at 3,239 metres, making it the tallest mountain in territory claimed by the United Kingdom. (Its location is also claimed by Argentina and Chile.) But it’s really about the British Antarctic Survey, who are using stereographic satellite data to create more accurate maps of Antarctica’s mountains for pilots operating on the continent. BAS press release. [Kenneth Field]

Maps and Empire: New Books

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
new-map-of-empire
first-mapping-america
dislocating-the-orient

Three academic books out this month deal with the subject of mapping, surveying, and empire-building:

The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence by S. Max Edelson (Harvard University Press) covers the period between the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution. From the publisher:

Under orders from King George III to reform the colonies, the Board of Trade dispatched surveyors to map far-flung frontiers, chart coastlines in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sound Florida’s rivers, parcel tropical islands into plantation tracts, and mark boundaries with indigenous nations across the continental interior. Scaled to military standards of resolution, the maps they produced sought to capture the essential attributes of colonial spaces—their natural capacities for agriculture, navigation, and commerce—and give British officials the knowledge they needed to take command over colonization from across the Atlantic.

Britain’s vision of imperial control threatened to displace colonists as meaningful agents of empire and diminished what they viewed as their greatest historical accomplishment: settling the New World. As London’s mapmakers published these images of order in breathtaking American atlases, Continental and British forces were already engaged in a violent contest over who would control the real spaces they represented.

Maps and visualizations to accompany the book are available online. [Amazon]

The First Mapping of America: The General Survey of British North America by Alex Johnson (I. B. Tauris) seems to cover similar territory, if you’ll pardon the pun, though I have very little information about it. [Amazon]

Finally, Daniel Foliard’s Dislocating the Orient: British Maps and the Making of the Middle East, 1854-1921 (University of Chicago Press) “vividly illustrates how the British first defined the Middle East as a geopolitical and cartographic region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through their imperial maps. Until then, the region had never been clearly distinguished from ‘the East’ or ‘the Orient.’ In the course of their colonial activities, however, the British began to conceive of the Middle East as a separate and distinct part of the world, with consequences that continue to be felt today.” [Amazon, iBooks]

Related: Map Books of 2017.

Early French Maps of the Great Lakes

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

On Tuesday, Jean-François Palomino of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec gave a talk on early French mapmaking efforts in the Great Lakes region at the University of Michigan. I missed being able to tell you about it in advance, but student newspaper The Michigan Daily has a writeup. [WMS]

(Palomino is one of the co-authors of Mapping a Continent: Historical Atlas of North America, 1492-1814, the French edition of which is La Mesure d’un continent.)