A collaboration between the California Geological Survey and the USGS, the Sierra Nevada Earth Science Atlas “provides the most detailed geologic framework mapping of California’s most iconic landscape to date. This web page hosts the numerous maps, data layers, and an associated report that make up the Atlas. Collectively, these layers and report show and describe the geology of the Sierra Nevada, a prominent mountain range that extends roughly north-south across eastern California and into a small portion of western Nevada, along with adjacent areas.” At the moment the Atlas consists of a geologic map plus appendices, along with a data package containing a number of map layers, with more to be added in the future.
In a blog post, David Smith discusses the challenges of getting good maps on the Apple Watch version of Pedometer++, version 8 of which shipped last month. “App design on watchOS is a really fun—but frustrating—challenge. You are designing for a relatively tiny screen, which must be operated one-handed. In this case, I want the user to be able to read the map and use it to navigate, while also having access to other workout-related information.” It involved years of iterative design, and a cartographer hired to create a custom base map layer.
Covering four distinct categories (“The Making of Boston,” “The Lay of the Land,” “Getting Around,” and “People and Culture” ), Andy Woodruff’s newly created, original maps investigate all facets of Boston’s past and present. In unraveling the many complex layers that comprise the “real” Boston, some explorations are expected: sports championships, universities, and pothole complaints. Others, such as the former cow paths that predated downtown streets, are decidedly more hidden.
Dig into the city’s history with a guided tour through Revolutionary War sites, landmarks of nineteenth-century Black Boston, and notable “first in the nation” events (like the first recorded UFO sighting). Uncover the structural forces that shaped the social and lived experience of Boston, with maps showing the impact of redlining, urban renewal practices, and the busing crisis of the 1970s. Discover how the city’s boundaries evolved through annexation and landfill and how they’ll continue to change due to coastal flooding risks. Explore some of Boston’s most unique quirks through surprising revelations about the density of Dunkin’ locations, the distinctive architecture of three-deckers, and the spread of the infamous Great Molasses Flood.
Andy previously co-authored the Bostonography site with Tim Wallace; in his page about his book he talks about what carried over from that project (only a few, actually) and what was new. Andy’s other work has been featured here several times before: start here.
Geoawesome’s Aleks Buczkowski looks at the art of Ed Fairburn, who combines portraiture with maps—basically, maps with a human face. “Fairburn’s work sits at the intersection of cartography and portraiture. It reminds us that maps are not just representations of space. They can also tell stories about people, identity, and place.” I covered Fairburn and his work back in February 2016.
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]
Are geofence warrants unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? Geofence warrants require a data provider to provide information on all users and devices within a given area during a given time period. Their constitutionality has been a grey area for some time, with U.S. federal court decisions disagreeing with one another. One of those cases, Chatrie v. United States, is being argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court today (here’s the PDF of the petition), so we may soon have a definitive answer.
In the first edition of Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, two leading historians explored details of the 350-year history of African slave traffic to the New World. They showed, with nearly 200 original maps, where the captives came from, how long the journeys lasted, how many died on the voyages, and what the ports and destinations were. They also presented details about the trade itself, including the economics.
In this groundbreaking revised edition, 25 new maps locate the major language groups involved in the traffic and show the movement of Africans from the interior of the continent to the Americas, as well as from one part of the Americas to another. Accompanying the maps, as in the first edition, are revealing illustrations and contemporary literary selections, including poems, letters, and diary entries.
With up-to-date information drawn from the database Slave Voyages, with its records of more than 36,000 voyages, the atlas provides the fullest possible picture of the extent and inhumanity of one of the largest forced migrations in history.
Claims circulating on social media that Apple erased towns and villages in southern Lebanon from Apple Maps as a kind of support for the Israeli invasion are not true, says Apple. Apple’s coverage of Lebanon has never been that great: the towns and villages were never on the map in the first place. But I suppose the people circulating the claim never bothered to look at Lebanon in Apple Maps before this. [AppleInsider]
Shri Khalpada explains the physics of GPS. “GPS is fundamentally a translation tool: it converts time into distance. A satellite sends a signal, your phone catches it, and the delay between those two events tells the phone exactly how far away the satellite is. Everything else is about making that measurement precise enough to be useful: accounting for bad clocks, satellite geometry, and eventually, Einstein’s theories.”
Reuters: “A U.S. mining company backed by billionaires Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates is in a tangle with Belgium’s AfricaMuseum over who should digitise antique maps of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo in the museum’s archive.” The colonial-era records in question take up some 500 metres of shelving and are already being digitized under a separate project with the DRC. The AfricaMuseum says it can’t hand the records over to a private company; the mining startup, KoBold Metals, also has an agreement with the Kinshasa government to digitize the data. [Tara Calishain]
