{"id":2274,"date":"2018-10-18T11:24:38","date_gmt":"2018-10-17T22:24:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/?p=2274"},"modified":"2023-05-07T03:27:05","modified_gmt":"2023-05-07T03:27:05","slug":"lost-in-the-arctic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/lost-in-the-arctic\/","title":{"rendered":"Lost in the Arctic"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this post we look at a challenging map situation and how some cartographic choices got in the way of a good article.<\/em><\/p>\n

While perusing the web recently, I came across an article on the lack of ice regrowth in the Arctic<\/a>\u00a0this year.\u00a0 It’s highlighting that at this\u00a0time in\u00a0the northern hemisphere, sea ice should be expanding as the temperatures begin to drop, but is not doing so this season.\u00a0 There was a nice graphic showing the changes in seasonal sea ice extent which was instructive.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

No problems so far (Ed. Um, well…)<\/em>. What threw me for a loop was a map that was included in the article.\u00a0 As usual, the caption for the map was at the bottom so when I first scrolled down to see it, I wasn’t really anticipating what it was showing – here’s the map:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Now I don’t know if it was just me or not, but at first glance, I had noooooo idea what this map was showing.\u00a0 There was nothing familiar to hang my perception on – what are the big grey areas?\u00a0 And all that white?\u00a0 Are they countries?\u00a0 Or provinces of the “Central Arctic”?\u00a0 Honestly, I stared at it for a good 30 seconds (a lifetime in most webpage attention spans) before I could make sense of it.\u00a0 And then finally the penny dropped – we’re looking down on the north pole and each of the coloured zones is a designated section of the Arctic Ocean.\u00a0 The map caption gives it away: “The regional seas of the Arctic Ocean.”\u00a0 As I found out in some later searching, \u00a0“scientists often refer to the different seas within the Arctic Ocean when they discuss sea ice extent”.\u00a0\u00a0Even knowing what it’s showing, I still find this map very disorienting; there are two main reasons for this.<\/p>\n

First, we’re looking at the surface of the earth from a very unfamiliar vantage point – above the north pole.\u00a0 With most map projections<\/a>, we’re looking sort of side on and land masses take on more familiar shapes.\u00a0 But in this map, the North American and Asian\/European continents\u00a0are seen from a very different angle.\u00a0 Couple this with the fact that the lines of longitude converge on the pole and therefore our familiar rectangular map area becomes circular (even though the map is cropped to a rectangle).\u00a0 This is a particular challenge of mapping at the poles.\u00a0 There are polar map projections that facilitate mapping at these extremes, like the one shown below:<\/p>\n

\"World<\/a>
http:\/\/www.geoatlas.fr\/<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

(Nice to see New Zealand at the TOP of a map for a change, even if we are upside down. [Ed. who’s to say what’s up or down<\/a>?]<\/em>)<\/p>\n

But\u00a0 I think this in only part of my dissonance.\u00a0 The other part relates to symbology, or the colour and symbol choices.\u00a0 In this case, the way that the map features have been shown contributes to some of my confusion, and I think this mainly relates to the continent\/ocean relationship.\u00a0 The aim of this map is to make it easy for the reader to understand where the different regional seas are.<\/p>\n

In my classes<\/a> I talk a lot about the background and foreground when making maps.\u00a0 It’s a bit like movies.\u00a0 While the filmmakers wants us to focus on the actors and the action,\u00a0they also includes background music and sound effects.\u00a0 If the filmmaker does their job right, we shouldn’t really notice the background music but we should definitely<\/em> feel the effect.\u00a0 Take your favorite movie scene and then remove the music.\u00a0 Does it have the same effect?\u00a0 Remove the Blue Danube from 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/a>, or\u00a0the soundtrack from Dunkirk<\/a>\u00a0and you have a very different effect.\u00a0 (Or a particular favourite of mine, Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs<\/a> in Peter Weir’s Fearless <\/a>– I’m sure you’ve got your own favourites – maybe you could add a comment?)\u00a0 If you’re\u00a0conscious of the background music, then you’re not focusing on the action on screen, and the effect is broken.\u00a0 With mapping, the “background\u00a0 music” is often the other data layers that provide you with some spatial context.\u00a0 In this map, I’m feeling very distracted by the background music, which, here, is the continents, and the “negative space” of the oceans.<\/p>\n

I dug a little bit deeper into this – the source for the map is the National Snow and Ice Data Center<\/a>\u00a0and they hold lots<\/em> of data from both poles.\u00a0 I went in search of some of their data to work with and came across this map:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
http:\/\/nsidc.org\/arcticseaicenews\/map-of-the-arctic-ocean\/<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This alone is a massive improvement (IMHO) – and it’s the combination of two things: good colour contrasts between land and sea (with sensible, meaningful colour choices) and labelling.\u00a0 This map uses different labels than the one we first looked at and labels both land and sea(s).\u00a0I’m in two minds about the blue colour – the deep blue is quite strong and maybe distracts a bit but\u00a0could also be a signifier of veeeery cold water temperatures.\u00a0\u00a0Note, there are no country boundaries – a cartographic choice.<\/p>\n

In many ways, this map is more effective than the original one we saw above.\u00a0 It clearly shows the same information but is more informative and easier to understand.\u00a0 If I were to try and improve on this map (which I can’t really, as I’ve not been able to find the raw data used), I might consider adding in some lines that could\u00a0further demarcate the seas (but maybe not use separate colours for each) and possibly add in lines of latitude and longitude, to provide a bit more spatial context – this wouldn’t be essential).<\/p>\n

I don’t mean to be overly critical of the cartographers\u00a0here: map making\u00a0is perhaps a bit more art than science, and a process fraught with choices to be made and their effects to be lived with.\u00a0 And mapping polar areas poses some very specific problems.\u00a0 For a site like Mashable, where readers come from a wide variety of backgrounds, the care and feeding of maps like this becomes important.\u00a0 In my case, I was so focused on trying to understand this map, that I think I missed the overall impact of the article.\u00a0 This may also be a good reminder that more often than not\u00a0with maps, less is more.<\/p>\n

(And a huge hat tip to NSIDC<\/a> – they have made a lot of useful Arctic and Antarctic data available on their site – more of that please.)<\/em><\/p>\n

C<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this post we look at a challenging map situation and how some cartographic choices got in the way of a good article. While perusing the web recently, I came across an article on the lack of ice regrowth in the Arctic\u00a0this year.\u00a0 It’s highlighting that at this\u00a0time in\u00a0the northern hemisphere, sea ice should be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2274"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4113,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2274\/revisions\/4113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}