All articles tagged with #cartography
A visit to Vienna's Globe Museum—the world's only public museum dedicated to globes—shows 220+ rare pre-1850 spheres that map how people imagined the Earth and the heavens, from Behaim's 1492 globe to lunar globes and colonial-era depictions, highlighting both imagination and bias, with a forthcoming exhibition on globes in everyday life.
A Conversation analysis argues that adding a generative AI tool to Google Earth threatened the long‑standing trust in maps, tracing how historical map errors (like the Mountains of Kong) shaped our view of the world, the role of copyright in mapmaking, and how Google's AI integration produced plausible but fake imagery that was rolled back with stronger guardrails, underscoring how critical trust is to the use of satellite maps in journalism, OSINT, and public understanding.
NASA released a gravity-based geoid visualization showing how the ocean surface would look under gravity alone (tidal and wind effects removed). Exaggerating gravity differences 10,000× highlights irregularities caused by dense interior regions, with the geoid peaking near Iceland (about 279 feet above the global average) and dipping south of India (about 348 feet below). Derived from over a billion measurements from the GOCE and GRACE satellites across ~15 years, the highly detailed geoid is not Earth’s physical shape but a tool to improve navigation, topographic surveys, and our understanding of the planet’s interior.
During a storm-evading leg of its mission, Germany’s RV Polarstern sighted what looked like a dirty iceberg that proved to be a rocky island rising from ice in the northwestern Weddell Sea, measuring about 130 by 50 meters. The feature, hidden under ice for decades in a region labeled an ‘unexplored danger zone,’ was confirmed using multibeam sonar and a drone, and its true position differs from existing charts by roughly one nautical mile. It currently has no official name, but will be submitted for international approval and added to nautical charts, underscoring the value of direct bathymetric surveys in polar regions.
The article discusses the limitations and biases of traditional maps, highlighting calls for a mapping revolution that emphasizes human connections, uncertainty, and multiple perspectives, moving away from state-centric and simplified representations to better reflect complex realities and histories.