Greenland, the Mercator, and You-Know-Who

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Somebody’s been talking about Greenland again, and we’re getting another flurry of articles about how Greenland’s apparent size on maps may be to blame for the obsession. Last year it was suggested that Trump wanted Greenland simply because it looked really big on the Mercator projection: Slate and Newsweek were a lot less circumspect about it than Foreign Policy was, but then they would be. The latest round of press appears to be equally circumspect. The Financial Times and Geographical magazine turn evidence of executive ignorance into some kind of teachable moment about map projections instead of saying outright: he thinks it’s bigger than it actually is, and that’s nuts. Providing some context is always good, but let’s try not to bury the lede.

Most people know the poles are exaggerated on the Mercator projection. They’ve seen other projections. In Rhumb Lines and Map Wars, Mark Monmonier pushed back against the argument that map projections distort our understanding of geography: “Do they never look at a globe, or at other maps? Are map users complete idiots?”1 It was a rhetorical question: of course they aren’t, he was saying. Apparently there’s an exception. But when the emperor has no clothes, you have to proceed as though most people run around naked.

Previously: Trump’s ‘Cartographic Compulsion’.

The Eclipse App

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Screenshot from The Eclipse App website showing the path of totality for the 2026 solar eclipse.
The Eclipse App (screenshot)

Eclipse Company co-founder Jesse Tomlinson writes: “Since you have many eclipse map posts on your site, I wanted to send a quick message letting you know about our newly rebuilt website, The Eclipse App. In 2023, you wrote about the maps we made for the 2023 annular eclipse and 2024 total eclipse.” Right now the site defaults to the 2026 solar eclipse over Greenland, Iceland and Spain, but it also covers the 2023, 2024, 2027 and 2028 eclipses, each with path-of-totality, historical cloud cover and solar position maps.

A New Map of Antarctica Suggests a Complex Landscape Under the Ice Sheet

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A new, far more detailed map of the landscape underneath Antarctica’s ice sheet, generated “by applying the physics of ice flow to ice surface maps and incorporating geophysical ice thickness observations.” There’s an aspect of speculation, of inference, to this method—the map is predicated on our understanding of how ice flows, and that understanding may change. But in the meantime the new map is suggesting the existence of some under-ice landforms hitherto undiscovered. BBC News, Reuters.

Previously: A New Map of the Land Beneath Antarctica’s Ice.

Submarine Cable Maps from 2013 to 2025

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A mosaic of submarine cable maps from TeleGeography: 2013, 2019, 2025.
TeleGeography

From May 2025: a blog post from TeleGeography looking back at their annual maps of submarine cables, which they’ve been putting out since at least 2013, and with a different design each year (here’s my post about the 2022 edition). Always the Mercator projection though. Affords a look at how the submarine cable network has expanded in recent years. [Kottke]

Gladys West, 1930-2026

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Gladys West and Sam Smith look over data from the Global Positioning System, which Gladys helped develop at the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, VA in 1985. (Wikimedia Commons)
Gladys West with Sam Smith in 1985 (U.S. Navy). Wikimedia Commons.

Gladys West has died at the age of 95. An African-American mathematician who grew up in Jim Crow Virginia, West “devoted herself to solving one of science’s most complex challenges: accurately modeling the shape of the Earth. Her painstaking calculations and programming helped transform raw satellite data into precise geodetic models, enabling reliable satellite-based navigation. That work ultimately became the backbone of the Global Positioning System (GPS)—now essential to aviation, shipping, emergency response, smartphones, and daily life worldwide.”

Previously: Gladys West, GPS’s Hidden Figure.

How Often Do Maps Appear in Literature?

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

How many novels include maps? For his 2013 monograph on fantasy maps and settings, Here Be Dragons, Stefan Ekman surveyed a random sample of 200 fantasy novels and found that about a third of them came with maps. Computational methods have now answered this question using a much bigger sample:

Digital humanities scholars from the Cornell Ann S. Bowers of Computing and Information Science have developed a computational system to mine maps from nearly 100,000 digitized books from the 19th and early 20th centuries, discovering that just 1.7% of novels include maps, mostly at the beginning or end, among other findings. 

They also discovered that 25% of maps in novels depict fictional settings, and military and detective fiction—not fantasy or science fiction—were the book genres most likely to contain a map, contrary to initial hunches.

Contrary to what I would have expected as well! See the article here (PDF). [Tara Calishain]

A Book Roundup

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Book covers for Free the Map, Radical Cartography and Secret Maps.

In a Guardian piece last month, Laura Spinney briefly touches on three books and the ways in which they subvert our understanding of what’s on the map and how we use them to see the world. They are Free the Map: From Atlas to Hermes: a New Cartography of Borders and Migration by Henk van Houtum et al. (nai10, 2024); William Rankin’s Radical Cartography (Picador/Viking, 2025); and Secret Maps, the book accompanying the exhibition of the same name (British Library/University of Chicago Press, 2025).

Doug Greenfield catches up with the 50 Maps series from Belt Publishing, focusing mainly on the two most recent: Cincinnati in 50 Maps by Nick Swartsell and maps by Andy Woodruff, and Columbus in 50 Maps by Brent Warren and maps by Vicky Johnson-Dahl. (Previously.)

Cincinnati in 50 Maps is one of two books—the other is Alan Wight’s Cincinnati’s Foodshed: An Art Atlas—that are the subject of a 23-minute segment on WVXU’s Cincinnati Edition this week, which interviews the authors.

A Global View of Wildfires

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Guardian maps the devastation wrought by wildfires across the globe. “Brazil, Bolivia, Russia, Australia and Canada have all endured some of their worst fire seasons in recent years, as heatwaves stoked by fossil fuel pollution drive the risk of extreme blazes higher. The maps, using data from the University of Maryland, show some of the hardest-hit forests.”

Miscellaneous Maps on Silk

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The British comedy/panel show QI had this short bit about silk escape maps being made into underthings after World War II. (This is from episode 6 of series U, which aired in February 2024.)

The folks behind the Melbourne Map also sell a series of silk/cotton map scarves [Mappery]. Hoopy froods may be more interested in the map towels, however.

Proposal 5

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A short piece in The New Yorker from Adam Gopnik about Proposal 5, which appeared on the New York City general election ballot last November. It called for a unified single digital city map maintained by the Department of City Planning, rather than a hodgepodge of maps held at the borough level. Gopnik:

Precinct-level map of the voting results on Proposal 5 in the November 2025 New York City general election.

Proposal 5 was actually a bit of skilled electoral craft on the part of the city’s map functionaries. (They exist.) There has been a digitized map of New York for nearly twenty-five years. The extended map, however, will add to its already rich inventory of features some street-specific ones that, for ancient and complicated reasons, have been jealously guarded on thousands of paper maps by the five borough presidents. Though no one in the know will say, exactly, that Proposal 5 was a way of using the electoral pressure of more than a million New Yorkers to get the borough presidents to release their maps, you do get the strong impression that Proposal 5 was a way of using the electoral pressure of more than a million New Yorkers to get the borough presidents to release their maps. Now street names, lines, and widths across the city will all be available on one consolidated official digital map.

From there Gopnik chases thoughtfulness by segueing to some national-level generalities, but I took the opportunity to poke at Proposal 5, which passed 73.6 percent to 26.4 percent. The main opposition came, as it seems to do with most things NYC, from the contrarian oasis of Staten Island. (See the precinct-level results map from “Fiveminutecrafts” on Wikipedia.)

Update, 18 Jan: Here’s more from Gothamist.

Some Canadian Homeowners Are Pushing Back Against Flood Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Narwhal reports that flood map updates are getting pushback in Canada too:

As provinces and municipalities amend decades-old flood maps and strengthen flood preparedness measures in the face of inclement climate change, a vocal minority of homeowners are pushing back. Some argue governments have failed to properly consult local communities and overlooked personal, on-the-ground mitigation measures. Others say their elected officials are focusing too much on penalizing property owners instead of initiatives that would reduce flood risk. But most express concern about their home values and insurance costs: last year, insurance company Desjardins announced it would no longer offer mortgages in Quebec’s high-risk flood zones.

Per the article, a big part of the problem is that despite flooding being the main risk from climate change, Canada is decades behind relative to other G7 countries in terms of flood planning, so a lot of this is new to people.

Related: Why FEMA Flood Maps Are Contentious.

Previously: Quebec Flood Maps Will Get a New Framework Next Year; The CBC on Inaccessible Flood Maps; Quebec’s Updated Flood Maps Prove Controversial; Quebec Flood Maps.

Monsters and Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Surekha Davies writes about on how monsters on maps led to her first book and then, in her second, to a consideration of why monsters exist as a category.

By taking images of monstrous peoples on maps seriously I broke both molds. For traditionalists, engravings of headless men in Guiana or giants in Patagonia were what they called “myth,” “fantasy,” or “mere decoration”: cartographers supposedly added monsters to make their maps more appealing to buyers, or because they feared empty space. The “maps as politics” brigade offered a third explanation: monsters on European maps from the age of exploration were propaganda crafted to justify colonialism. For both factions, there was supposedly nothing more to say. I begged to differ.

Londonist Asks ChatGPT to Draw Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

“The shortcomings and possibilities of generative AI are, of course, well chronicled across a million op-eds. I could write at length about the dangers or opportunities the technology presents,” writes Matt at Londonist. “But this is a newsletter about London, and I’m still in a silly holiday-season mindset. So all I’m going to do today is ask AI to draw some historical maps of the capital, and then take the p*ss out of them. Popcorn at the ready . . . ” It goes about as well as you’d expect: “terribly,” with results “as crazy as a yacht of numbats,” with labels “so bizarre that I don’t know where to begin.”

The State of The Map Room, Plus New Pages

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The State of The Map Room in 2025: On my Patreon, I look back on how this site did in terms of traffic and income over the past year.

Map Books of 2026: Already live, though at this stage there aren’t very many books listed. You know the drill: if you know something’s coming out this year, let me know.

Map Stores: Another work in progress, this is a list of brick-and-mortar map stores around the world. Does not include online stores, or antique map dealers (which are a different category, and could probably use their own page); these are retail stores you can visit during regular hours and buy maps from. For comparison, see Andrew Middleton’s map, which includes non-profit institutions like archives and libraries, and Zhaoxu Sui’s list of global map stores, from which I’ve been cribbing disgracefully.

The Onion on the New York Subway

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Onion: MTA Admits to Fabricating Large Parts of Subway Map. “‘Frankly, no one I know has ever ridden farther than the Carroll Street Station in Brooklyn. We’re not really sure what’s out there, but we figured we’d better put something on the map. Now we see the error in our ways. It was a mistake to trick New Yorkers into believing the G train exists—it does not.’” (Responses on social media are invariably some variant of I knew it.)