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Membership Drive

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
16 / 22

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” →

OpenTimes

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Dan Snow announced the launch of OpenTimes, “a free database of pre-computed, point-to-point travel times between major U.S. Census geographies.”

The primary goal here is to enable research and fill a gap I noticed in the open-source spatial ecosystem. Researchers (social scientists, economists) use large travel time matrices to quantify things like access to healthcare, but they often end up paying Google or Esri for the necessary data. By pre-calculating times between commonly-used research geographies (i.e. Census) and then making those times easily accessible via SQL, I hope to make large-scale accessibility research cheaper and simpler.

The idea here is bulk data for research purposes: think isochrones, not individualized route navigation.

A New Map of the Land Beneath Antarctica’s Ice

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
An elevation map showing the topography of Antarctica underneath its ice sheet. Polar projection centred on the South Pole. Colour. From Pritchard et al., Bedmap3 updated ice bed, surface and thickness gridded datasets for Antarctica. Sci Data 12, 414 (2025).
From Pritchard et al., Bedmap3 updated ice bed, surface and thickness gridded datasets for Antarctica. Sci Data 12, 414 (2025).

The British Antarctic Society has announced the release of Bedmap3, the third and twice-as-detailed topographic model of the landscape beneath the Antarctic ice sheet.

Bedmap3, as the name suggests, is the third attempt to draw a picture of Antarctica’s rock bed that began in 2001, but this new effort represents a dramatic refinement. It includes more than double the number of previous data points (82 million), rendered on a 500 m grid spacing.

Big knowledge gaps have been filled by recent surveys in East Antarctica, including around the South Pole, along the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctic coastlines, and in the Transantarctic Mountains.

The outline of deep valleys is better represented. So too are those places where rocky mountains stick up through the ice. The latest satellite data have also more accurately recorded the height and shape of the ice sheet and the thickness of the floating ice shelves that push out over the ocean at the continent’s margin.

For crunchier details, see the article in Scientific Data.

Previously: Mapping Antarctica’s Bedrock.

Mapping the University of Chicago’s Expansion into Its Surrounding Neighbourhoods

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Chicago Maroon, the University of Chicago’s student newspaper, has posted a story map showing the university’s relationship with, and expansion into, the surrounding neighbourhoods. “As the University of Chicago has expanded its property footprint on the South Side, conflicting priorities, land use disputes, and racial tension have characterized a historically fraught ‘town and gown’ relationship with the surrounding neighborhoods. Setting the stage for others to follow, the University was the first higher education institution to embark on an urban renewal campaign of its kind, a topic University scholars and students have written on extensively.”

The Trouble with Inflight Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Air Canada has apologized after its inflight maps were found showing the Palestinian Territories but not Israel, blaming an outside supplier and disabling the feature until a fix is made. The times are such that this sort of thing can be inflammatory as hell. Thing is, it’s not remotely the first time it’s happened. Per CNN’s reporting, it happened with JetBlue’s maps last year and with British Airways back in 2013.

So what’s going on? None of the articles give any sort of explanation, though the Snopes page suggests that GeoFusion is the ultimate source of the inflight maps. My guess is that there are airlines that cannot or will not show Israel on a map: several Gulf state carriers come to mind, and GeoFusion lists several on its website (though to be fair I have no knowledge of whether this actually applies to them). Is it possible that GeoFusion has a bespoke no-Israel version for these carriers, and every so often other airlines get that version by mistake?

Frankly if GeoFusion doesn’t have different versions of its maps I’d be shocked, seeing as they list Air India and several Chinese carriers as their clients, and the map required by one country is illegal in the other. To say nothing of how a China-compliant map with the Nine-dash Line would land with Vietnam Airlines, or Crimea-as-Ukraine with Aeroflot.

Inflight maps aren’t an immediately obvious front line in the various map wars (disputed borders, place names, etc.) but now that I think about it . . .

Apple Maps Surveyor

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A screenshot of Maps Surveyor from the Apple App Store
Maps Surveyor screenshot. Apple App Store.

Last week Apple launched Maps Surveyor, a mapping app with a specific purpose, MacRumors reports. “The app is not public facing and appears to be for use with companies that Apple partners with to assign mapping tasks. […] Strings in Apple’s Surveyor app found by MacRumors suggest that once assigned a mapping task by the Premise app, Premise users will be instructed to attach an iPhone to a mount, rotate the iPhone‌ to landscape orientation, and capture images along a route while driving using the Surveyor app.” In other words, it’s the user end of a crowdsourcing pipeline that funnels local data to Apple Maps via a third party “task marketplace.” Not something most of us would ever use.

Multispectral Imaging Comes to a 15th-Century Mappamundi

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
The Leardo mappamundi, 1452.

The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee is bringing in the Lazarus Project to carry out multispectral imaging on a 1452 mappamundi by Giovanni Leardo. This is the oldest map in the collection of the American Geographical Society Library, which is housed at UWM. The Lazarus Project is a portable laboratory that brings multispectral imaging to the artifact, rather than the other way around (artifacts being fragile and all, and the Leardo mappamundi is no exception).

“It’s fascinating to watch for the first 10 minutes,” [Lazarus Project board member Chet] Van Duzer said. “After that, it’s like watching paint dry.” The map will be scanned with at least a dozen frequencies of light, and probably more, ranging from infrared through visible light up to ultraviolet. But in the months after taking the original images, “the real magic is in processing,” Van Duzer said. Different combinations of images at different strengths may reveal faded writing that used various pigments of ink.

Previously: Multispectral Analysis Reveals Lost Details on a 16th-Century Portolan Chart.

Google Maps Has a Lot of User-Contributed Imagery in the Wrong Places

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Geography Now was poking around northern Chad in Google Maps and came across a bunch of user-contributed 360-degree images of business interiors that had nothing to do with Chad: they were associated with businesses in Brazil, India, Hungary and so forth. I’m inclined to think these were geocoding glitches or user errors, since the Gulf of Guinea (home of Null Island) seems to have a particularly bountiful crop of them, but I’m spotting shop and schoolroom interiors in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean too.

FEMA Risk Maps Purged

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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.

New Research on the Tabula Peutingeriana

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A portion of the Tabula Peutingeriana focusing on southern Italy, I think.
A portion of the Tabula Peutingeriana

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.

Apple Exploring Advertising in Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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.

Google Maps: Rounded Corners and Live Updates

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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).

‘Gulf of America’ Update: AP Sues White House Officials

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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.