Is ‘Gulf of Mexico’ Worth Fighting For?

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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.

GeoFeeds

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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.

‘Gulf of America’ Isn’t Going Over Well

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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.

‘Gulf of America’: Apple Conforms, AP Punished for Not Doing So

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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.

Paranneaux Globes

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
An image from the Paranneaux Globes website, showing a selection of small sculpted globes on metal stands.
Paranneaux Globes

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).

Google and the Gulf

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A screenshot from Google Maps showing the Gulf of Mexico labelled as 'Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)'
What I see here in Canada. Google Maps (screenshot)

Three weeks to the day after Trump’s executive order directing that the Gulf of Mexico be renamed Gulf of America, the new name now appears on Google Maps for U.S. users; outside the U.S. and Mexico, users see both names. A blog post by Google outlines who will see what where.

A screenshot showing different labels of the Gulf of Mexico depending on where you are: U.S. users get Gulf of America, Mexican users get Gulf of Mexico, everyone else gets Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America).
Google (screenshot)

Andrew Middleton notes that review by the Board on Geographic Names “usually takes a while. Two weeks is a freaking speed run. The Board is completely nuts if they think it’s ok to approve a name that no one even heard of before last month.”

More coverage at BBC News, CNN, TechCrunch and The Verge.

Previously: Naming the Gulf; Google Maps to Use ‘Gulf of America’–Others Not So Much; More Reactions to ‘Gulf of America’.

Getting on the Name-Changing Bandwagon

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker has decided to get in on the whole unilateral name-changing thing.

An important announcement from the Governor of Illinois.

— JB Pritzker (@jbpritzker.bsky.social) 2025-02-07T20:34:44.620Z

See also Barry Blitt’s cartoon in The New Yorker.

Previously: Naming the Gulf; Google Maps to Use ‘Gulf of America’–Others Not So Much; More Reactions to ‘Gulf of America’.

Alaska Legislature Opposes Denali Name Change

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Sure, the Gulf of Mexico thing got most of the attention (because it’s an international body of water), but Trump’s decision to change the name of Denali back to Mount McKinley is getting some pushback too—namely from Alaska’s legislature. The Associated Press reports that Alaska’s state Senate and House have voted in favour of a resolution asking Trump to reverse course and retain Denali as the name of the continent’s tallest mountain.

Google Maps at 20

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Google Maps launched 20 years ago today. Here’s what I posted at the time:

First impressions. This is frigging amazing, with smooth scrolling and zooming: you’re not constantly reloading pages like in MapQuest. Huge mapping surface. And drop shadows. […] I’m impressed by the detail. They’ve got my area, which is kind of a rural backwater: they’ve got the roads all named, but strangely not the towns. Oh well, data’s rarely perfect—especially when it’s just a beta launch. And for a beta this is awfully impressive.

A flurry of additional announcements followed in quick sucession: the launch of Google Earth, the Maps API that enabled people to build their own maps on top of Google’s interface. The mid-2000s were a busy time for online maps, let me tell you. I had so much to keep up with.

The development and origins of Google Maps, and Google Earth, are the subject of the latest and timely installment of James Killick’s “12 Map Happenings that Rocked Our World.” It seems that the Maps side of things was largely about providing Google search results through a map interface, and when you look at Google’s post commemorating the 20th anniversary, which highlights 20 features of Google Maps, it’s clear how expansive that idea has become.

James also makes reference to a book I somehow completely missed when it came out: Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality, an insider history by Google project manager Bill Kilday. (Harper Business, 2018). Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

More Reactions to ‘Gulf of America’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Yesterday’s post looked mainly at Google’s response to Trump’s renaming of Denali and the Gulf of Mexico. Today some news about Apple and OpenStreetMap. On Daring Fireball, John Gruber points to OpenStreetMap forum discussions about the change, which reveals some nuances and complications despite the utter lunacy of the situation. And AppleInsider reports a small change in Apple Maps that may or may not be a placeholder:

If users navigate to the Gulf of Mexico, it still shows the 400-year-old name plain as day.

However, if a user searches “Gulf of America,” the text over the Gulf changes to reflect the search result, but the information sheet shows data and photos about the Gulf of Mexico. This seems to be a working solution that could stick, but there isn’t any word from Apple if that is the plan.

Meanwhile, according to CNN, Mexico’s response to the name change ranges somewhere between dismissive and mocking. The Conversation offers a primer on what goes into changing a U.S. place name.

On the lighter side, Martijn van Exel has created a Gulf of Mexico Watcher that checks whether it’s still being called that. More bitter in tone are the MAGA plugin and the New World Order Google Map, which offer a more … interactive response.

Previously: Naming the Gulf; Google Maps to Use ‘Gulf of America’–Others Not So Much.

Google Maps to Use ‘Gulf of America’–Others Not So Much

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Lots of news coverage about Google’s announcement that it will follow Trump’s lead and change Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America (and Denali to Mount McKinley) on Google Maps once the GNIS database has been updated—at least when showing it to American users. Mexicans will still get Gulf of Mexico, while the rest of us will get both names. See coverage at BBC, CNBC, CNN, Guardian, TechCrunch, among many many many others.

I’m not sure why some people were expecting Big Tech to lead the resistance (especially a trillion-dollar company), and over one of the easiest things to undo once this is all over: Google has made a point of accommodating government requests on its maps, showing the “right” borders and place names to the right users. See previous post: Google Maps as Non-State Authority.

But not everyone is falling into line. The British government has no plans to refer to it as the Gulf of America, nor will British maps change unless it becomes the most commonly used name: see The Independent and The Telegraph.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press is updating its stylebook in a way that splits the difference, following Trump on Denali/Mount McKinley because it’s fully within his purview but pointing to the Gulf’s international status: “The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years. The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen. As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.”

Previously: Naming the Gulf.

Update 9:10 PM: More detail from CNBC, which reports that “Google’s maps division on Monday reclassified the U.S. as a ‘sensitive country,’ a designation it reserves for states with strict governments and border disputes […] Google’s list of sensitive countries includes China, Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, among others. […] Google’s order states that the Gulf of America title change should be treated similar to the Persian Gulf, which in Arab countries is displayed on Google Maps as Arabian Gulf.”

Kathleen Jennings Shows Us How She Draws a Fantasy Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A series of sketches by Kathleen Jennings of what would become her map for The Wild Huntress by Emily Lloyd-Jones.
Kathleen Jennings

In addition to being an author in her own right, Kathleen Jennings is an illustrator who draws maps for other fantasy novels. For a recent work—The Wild Huntress by Emily Lloyd-Jones—she takes us behind the scenes, going step by step through the process to create the map. I always love posts like these (for previous examples, see How to Make a Fantasy Map; Mapping An Ember in the Ashes; Mapping The Drowning Eyes; Mapping the Dreamlands). I also love that she’s still working with ink on paper.

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.”