A Map of Polar Bears in Iceland, Where They Don’t Belong

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Left: a map of Iceland showing where polar bears have been reported in recorded history. Right: A bar graph showing the number of polar bears reported in Iceland, in 50-year increments.
Náttúrufræðistofnun Íslands

The Icelandic Institute of Natural History has mapped every known appearance of polar bears in Iceland: “Polar bears are not native to Iceland, although they do occasionally turn up in Iceland and are thus classified as vagrants. Information exists on just over 600 polar bears recorded as having arrived in Iceland from the beginning of human settlement on the island to the present day. This is a somewhat imprecise figure, since polar bears have undoubtedly come ashore without their presence going noticed, while bear sightings and encounters were not always documented in the past. The last polar bear observation was at Höfðaströnd in Jökulfirðir in September 2024.”

TPR on the Map Center

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Public’s Radio talks with Andrew Middleton, who you will remember took over the Map Center in Pawtucket, RI in 2023. The focus of the piece is on how Andrew came to own the store and why he doesn’t see Google and Apple as competitors. “I see them as selling information. I do not sell information. I sell a good story.”

Previously: Paper Maps: New Business, Lost Loves; A Map of Map Institutions.

Rivers & Roads: The Art of Getting There

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Almost missed this. Rivers & Roads: The Art of Getting There is an exhibition in the corridor gallery of Harvard’s Pusey Library that runs until 31 January 2025. It’s about getting from point A to point B over the centuries, and that hasn’t always meant using a map with a grid system. For more, see the Harvard Gazette’s interview with the exhibit’s curator, Molly Taylor-Poleskey.

Naming the Gulf

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

It’s been a grand total of one day since Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Secretary of the Interior to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Or, to be more precise,

within 30 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of the Interior shall, consistent with 43 U.S.C. 364 through 364f, take all appropriate actions to rename as the “Gulf of America” the U.S. Continental Shelf area bounded on the northeast, north, and northwest by the States of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and extending to the seaward boundary with Mexico and Cuba in the area formerly named as the Gulf of Mexico. The Secretary shall subsequently update the GNIS to reflect the renaming of the Gulf and remove all references to the Gulf of Mexico from the GNIS, consistent with applicable law. The Board shall provide guidance to ensure all federal references to the Gulf of America, including on agency maps, contracts, and other documents and communications shall reflect its renaming.

Despite the timetable of Trump’s order, and the fact that his pick for interior secretary hasn’t as of this writing even been confirmed yet (in the meantime, presumably the order falls uncomfortably in the lap of the acting secretary, a career official), Trump’s followers are already after people to adopt the name change right now, dammit. A Republican congressman is after Apple about their maps, and the Gulf of Mexico Wikipedia article’s talk page has exploded as users come in demanding the name change. And even after the GNIS changes the name—and to be clear, what we’re talking about is the name of the portion of the Gulf of Mexico found in U.S. territorial waters, because a country can’t unilaterally change the name of an international body of water—you can’t force anyone to use that name: not other countries, not private companies, and certainly not individuals.

But oh, you can take note of who refuses to do so. “Gulf of America” is basically a loyalty test—a MAGA shibboleth.

Whatever your take on Trump’s rhetoric about the Gulf of Mexico being an integral part of the U.S., the Gulf of Mexico’s name predates that status, and not by not a little bit. The United States did not reach the Gulf of Mexico until the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which gave it New Orleans and the mouth of the Mississippi, and the Spanish Cession of 1819, which gave it Florida and the Gulf Coast east of Texas. How much before that did the Gulf of Mexico get its name? Let’s find some answers by looking at old maps.

Continue reading “Naming the Gulf” →

Watch Duty

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Watch Duty

In the wake of the recent wildfires in southern California, Watch Duty—a simple, free app that provides real-time fire maps and alerts, and which prizes, and is prized for, accurate data, collated by its volunteer reporters—has become the most popular app on the App Store and is being hailed as an essential lifeline: see The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Verge, Washington Post (paywalls on some links).

Karen Wynn Fonstad’s Belated NYT Obituary

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Karen Wynn Fonstad, the cartographer of fantasy worlds best known for her Atlas of Middle-earth, died in March 2005 aged 59. Nearly twenty years later, she gets a comprehensive obituary in the New York Times, replete with lots of examples of her mapmaking, as part of its Overlooked series, which gives belated obituaries to “remarkable people whose deaths […] went unreported in The Times.” Paywalled; workarounds via the usual suspects.

A Cartographer’s Tale

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Miguel García Álvarez of Mapas Milhaud has been writing a Spanish-language newsletter about maps for nearly two years. Now he’s started a newsletter in English: A Cartographer’s Tale. He writes: “In this newsletter, I will adapt some of the work I publish (and have published) in Milhaud Maps into English. I like to talk about adapting, as it takes more than a mere translation to let a text make sense and take shape in another language. There will also be articles that I will first publish in English and later adapt to Spanish.”

The Palazzo Vecchio’s Map Room, Restored and Virtual

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A screenshot from the virtual version of the Pallazo Vecchio’s Map Room.
Museo Galileo (screenshot)

Restoration work has been completed on the Palazzo Vecchio’s Map Room (no relation); see this Popular Archaeology article for details and photos. In tandem with the restoration, there is now a virtual version of the Map Room that allows you to explore the maps in a virtual facsimile of the room. The maps can also be superimposed on the globe. If this is all a bit too virtual, there’s also an index.

Daylighting Rivers

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Screenshot from a CBC News interactive story about daylighting rivers: an interactive map showing buried rivercourses on the Island of Montreal.
CBC News (screenshot)

Last April, CBC News ran an interactive, map-rich story about buried waterways in Canada’s large cities—buried largely for sanitary reasons—and initiatives to restore old and forgotten creeks and rivers to the surface. Focuses on Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, but there are links to other cities at the end.

California Wildfires, January 2025

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Online maps of the current wildfires burning near Los Angeles:

Update, 3:50 PM EST (via Lauren Tierney):

Update, 10 Jan at 1:45 PM EST:

Update, 13 Jan at 9:35 PM EST:

A Stranger Quest Now Available Online

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A Stranger Quest, the documentary about David Rumsey by Andrea Gatopolous, is now available to the public online, having made its debut last year at the Torino Film Festival (previously) and made the rounds of the film festival circuit. In it, Rumsey, who turned 80 this year, ruminates about loss and mortality, filtered through various lenses: the loss of a friend, the legacy created by a lifetime of map collecting. And let me tell you, it’s a trip. It’s not so much about maps (though the Urbano Monte reconstruction makes several appearances), or map collecting, as it is about a particular map collector; and it approaches its subject edgewise. With long silences, and long scenes shot from enough distance that they make the viewer feel like they’re eavesdropping on private conversations rather than watching a documentary, to say nothing of extended sojourns in Second Life, it’s far from what I would have expected, but I cannot deny the overwhelming art of it.

Reimagining Rural Cartographies

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Reimagining Rural Cartographies is a series from independent rural news outlet Barn Raiser that “features written and photo essays that create or examine nontraditional and living maps of the Midwest. How does the path a cougar took to roam into the heart of Chicago help us understand how urban, suburban and rural landscapes are changing? What really happens in the forest at the center of a recent Landback movement? How does the USPS serve as a rural lifeline, connecting neighbors and faraway places, despite service cuts?” Three articles so far.