Mountains are almost ubiquitous in fantasy maps, and almost always drawn in profile, as a line of hill signs. In a Patreon post, mapmaker John Wyatt Greenlee (aka the Surprised Eel Historian) discusses a couple of ways to draw mountains and mountain ranges in the usual fantasy map style.
A map dealer’s catalogue is not the first place you’d expect to be a locus of resistance. Even so, in the first 2026 catalogue from map dealer Neatline Maps, Kristoffer Damgaard curates a selection of Greenland-focused material, along with a ten-page history of the mapping and exploration of Greenland. “Understanding how Greenland was explored and mapped over time provides an important context for understanding why the present confrontation is so deeply unnecessary and wrong.” Thanks to Fred for the tip.
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.
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, 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.
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.”
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]
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.”
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.)
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:
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.)
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.
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.
