Blogging about maps since 2003
Ars Technica on plans by Xona Space Systems to launch a constellation of low-Earth-orbit navigation satellites. Compared with GPS, the satellites would be much more resistent to interference because their signals would be 100 times stronger; on the other hand, the system needs 258 satellites to achieve full coverage, not 24, and low-Earth orbit is getting a bit crowded.
Previously: ESA Considering Low-Orbit Satellites to Improve Galileo System.
A members-only exhibition at the Royal Geographic Society, Skin Maps: Semi-Permeable Cartography, features “collages and reworkings of historic maps” by artist Steph Morris. From Morris’s website:
The new collages by Steph on display arose from an intimate study of historic maps, many from the Royal Geographical Society collections, including seventeenth-century vellum portolan charts and historic atlases. They provided both material and inspiration. Handling maps hand-drawn on calf skin led him to consider the similarities between these depictions of landmasses and seas and the bodies of mammals, especially humans, with their liquids and solids, entry and exit points, contours and incursions; it seemed as if the cartographers had explored those similarities too. Many of the historic atlases he examined also contain illustrations of battles on land and sea, reminders of conflict and bloodshed which felt far from historic. The critical bodily health of the world’s lands and seas was also hard to ignore.
His process involved exploring anagrams, negatives/positives, shadows, inversions and reflections and the simple syntax of collage: what happens when you place disparate things alongside each other to create a new grammar. As well as maps from previous centuries, this frequently involved material such as cookbooks and gardening manuals from previous decades.
Non-members take heart: guided tours of the exhibition, open to the public, take place on 28 July (i.e., tomorrow) and 11 August (free, registration required). Also, Morris is holding a collage-map art workshop on 31 July (free, registration). And you can see highlights of the exhibition at Morris’s Instagram account (see above).
Skin Maps opened on 12 June and closes 16 August 2026. [Katie Parker]
I’m opposed to generative AI and all its works. According to some leading names in the cartographic community, that makes me a gatekeeper, a Luddite, and an irrational AI hater.
So, generative AI has come to cartography. The ICA’s Commission on Map Design has been posting examples of maps produced using generative AI tools, and there’s a website highlighting the ways you can use ChatGPT to generate maps using natural language prompts. The proponents of this stuff have been making some fairly inflammatory statements in its defence, such that I can only imagine they’ve been getting some grief about using it and are pushing back against it. Hence the stuff about gatekeepers, Luddites and haters. These are epithets I’ve seen thrown around before by pro-AI advocates in other fields where the use of generative AI has proven even more controversial. They’re not new. They’re also not worth taking seriously.
Continue reading “Gatekeepers, Luddites, Haters and AI-Generated Maps”
A new interactive map predicts the density and extent of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks, which exist in symbiosis with land plants. The estimate is based on soil samples and data from previous studies, fed through machine learning models. The extent of the networks comes to something like 110 quadrillion kilometres of hyphae (equivalent to roughly half the distance to most globular clusters). More here; via Wired ( News+).
I recently fell down the mechanical watch rabbit hole, and in doing so inadvertently discovered that maps and watches have a long history with each other. It’s a relationship that started long before smart watches brought detailed maps and turn-by-turn directions to our wrists. In this post I’ll explore some of the ways that mechanical, quartz and digital watches have incorporated maps into their interfaces, or turned themselves into mapping and navigation tools, without ever connecting to a GPS satellite or loading Google Maps. It’s old school, but the way a paper map is old school, which is to say: objectively capable of doing fewer things, but still not nothing, and in some cases quite impressive given the tech involved.
What follows is a roundup of the kinds of watches that have something to do something with maps. I’ll proceed very, very roughly from least to most expensive—the cheapest watches running somewhere around $30, the most expensive rather eye-wateringly more than that—with a couple of representative examples from each category. This won’t be comprehensive or exhaustive; obsessive watch nerds will no doubt be able to come up with a lot more examples.
Continue reading “Maps and Watches”
A study of the diet of chinook salmon in the Salish Sea has enabled researchers to create a map of the availability of their forage species. The Tyee:
Instead of scientists trawling to try to catch small and agile forage fish themselves, they’ve partnered with local anglers like Hackinen who are catching the salmon that are eating the small fish.
The Salish Sea is the inland sea between Vancouver Island, mainland British Columbia and Washington state. Its forage fish include Pacific herring, Pacific sand lance, northern anchovy, lantern fish and tiny shrimp and crustaceans.
To support the study, known as the Adult Salmon Diet Program, local anglers recorded data about their daily chinook and coho catches before sending scientists the fish’s guts.
Using fish guts to make a map.
Wired: “Satellite technology is being used to streamline rescue efforts in Venezuela following the two earthquakes that struck on June 24. Space agencies have shared images with emergency authorities and the Venezuelan government that not only reveal the magnitude of the disaster but also allow response teams to identify where to focus their efforts—and the challenges on the ground.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has now ruled on the constitutionality of geofence warrants, SCOTUSblog reports. “The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that when law enforcement officials used a ‘geofence warrant’—a warrant that instructed Google to provide location data for cellphone users who were near a particular place during a specific time period—to obtain evidence used to convict a Virginia man of a 2019 bank robbery, they conducted a ‘search’ for purposes of the Fourth Amendment.” More on the tech side of this from John Gruber. Because Google stopped storing users’ location data in 2024 (Apple never collected such data), they ca no longer respond to geofence warrants in any event. But that doesn’t mean the question will always be moot in the future.
Previously: The Constitutionality of Geofence Warrants Is Before the U.S. Supreme Court Today.
Scans from a 1776 atlas of the Americas, published in London as the American revolution was getting under way, have been posted by JSTOR. The story from JSTOR Daily:
In the summer of 1775, shortly after George Washington took charge of the newly formed Continental Army in Boston, a small advertisement appeared in the London newspapers, announcing the publication of The American Atlas: Or, A Geographical Description of the Whole Continent of America. The volume—which bore the name of the late Thomas Jefferys, who had held the title of Geographer to the King—promised a view of the continent’s “several Regions, Countries, States, and Islands, and chiefly the BRITISH COLONIES.”
The atlas was designed to capitalize on public interest in the “rebellion,” as King George III would call it in an August 1775 proclamation. Through the war, the well-to-do English reader with two pounds, twelve shilling and six pence to spare could follow news from this faraway land across a series of maps. (In editions published in subsequent years, the maps even included descriptions of Britain’s tactical victories, such as at the Battle of Valcour Island in Lake Champlain.)
Two hundred and fifty years later, the modern reader can do the same, for free, thanks to a larger edition of the atlas, dated 1776, shared via JSTOR by the Leighton Library and the University of Stirling. As geographer Rita Ann Gardiner wrote for the Royal Geographical Society, this was the extent of “the knowledge of the topography of the New World available to London mapmakers in 1776.”
Apple’s operating system upgrades this year seem to be focusing on scores of small improvements along with a ton of AI integrations so it’s no surprise that announced upgrades to Apple Maps in iOS/
Google has added the country of Georgia to Street View. This was a partnership with the Georgian government, so it’s no shock that Abkhazia and South Ossetia are not part of the package.
Bodleian Map Room Blog: “In early September one of the library treasures, the Oxfordshire Sheldon tapestry, will be taken off display. One of a set of four there’s been a Sheldon tapestry on display in Blackwell Hall for the last ten years, a riot of colour and history which has drawn visitors to them and will be missed when no longer there.” One of four tapestry maps of English counties commissioned in the late 16th century by Ralph Sheldon, the Oxfordshire tapestry went on display at the Bodleian in 2019, replacing a display of the Worcestershire tapestry. I assume it’s coming down for conservation reasons (they don’t say); no word either on what will take its place.
Previously: Sheldon Tapestry Map of Oxfordshire on Display; A Video About the Oxfordshire Tapestry Map.
Jerry’s Map is still going strong. For decades, Jerry Gretzinger has been creating a map made up of thousands of individual paper tiles that are created, revised and even painted over based on an arcane, cards-based system of rules. He first came to our attention in 2009, thanks to Greg Whitmore’s short film, “Jerry’s Map.” People Make Games have just released a 47-minute documentary film in which we are reintroduced to Jerry, now in his eighties and still working on the map; the film shows the entire 4,100-tile map being assembled over a three-day period, which is something to see. (You should absolutely watch “Jerry’s Map” first, though.) [MetaFilter]
Previously: Jerry’s Map.
Out this week: Little Blue Dot: How the Global Positioning System Shaped the Modern World by Katherine Dunn. From the publishers’ descriptions (plural: it’s out from Bloomsbury in the U.S. and HarperCollins imprint Mudlark in the U.K.), it functions as a history of GPS, a look at its impact, and a warning about its vulnerabilities. The Walrus has published an excerpt, titled “How to Hack a Superyacht,” that explores the rise of GPS spoofing (which is using a device to replace the weak GPS satellite signal with one that gives false location data, as opposed to GPS jamming, which blocks the signal altogether—spoofing, Dunn says, is worse than jamming).
Cartes imaginaires: Inventer des mondes, an exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France running from 24 March to 19 July 2026, explores maps of the imaginary, the legendary and the literary from medieval to modern times. A symposium this past April on maps and popular culture was held in conjunction with this exhibition, but I somehow missed reporting on the exhibition itself. Fortunately, Surekha Davies has attended it, and has this report: “I went around this show a couple of times with different friends. From Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth to a map of Guiana derived from Sir Walter Ralegh’s travel narrative about the region, it felt at times like the library had put this show on specially for me!”
(Though she disagrees with placing sea monsters in the same category as fantasy maps: she argues that they’re a representation of the hidden, inaccessible or strange, not the fanciful. On which she points to her 2020 essay in Aeon, which is worth reading.)
Previously: Monsters and Maps; A Paris Symposium on Maps and Popular Culture.
GPS jamming has come to space. Researchers have identified a Russian satellite as the source of 10-second radio bursts that have been disrupting GNSS signals.
Occasional bursts of energy from a Russian missile-detection satellite have been briefly disrupting satellite navigation across large parts of Europe, a pattern that may indicate a “qualitative escalation in GNSS [global navigation satellite system] interference.”
At least 75 times between 2019 and 2026, University of Texas researchers observed 10-second bursts of high-powered radio signals at 1558.5 MHz: the frequency used by GPS and European navigation satellites to transmit signals to Earth. The bursts disrupted GPS antennas from Romania to Greenland, the researchers write in a paper published this month in the journal Navigation.
