Cartographic dispute at the UN : every country puts itself at the center of the World Map

photo Cornell University

 

From BalticSentinel by Marek Strandberg

Imagine cutting open a globe and pressing it flat: something inevitably gets distorted.
Some maps preserve areas more accurately, others shapes or directions, but no map can preserve all three at once.
That is why Africa can look surprisingly small and Greenland enormous, even though their actual sizes tell a different story.
A map’s center, projection, and even place names are choices that shape how we perceive the world.
Is a map, then, a tool for measurement—or also, in ways we may not notice, a worldview?

A world map is never simply a miniature copy of the world.
Every map determines what sits at the center, what gets stretched out, what is pushed to the margins, and what disappears altogether.
According to Raivo Aunap, 62, an associate professor of cartography at the University of Tartu (Estonia), cartography involves science and technology, but at least as much art — and with it, the ability to shape our understanding of power, space, and ultimately ourselves.

Cartographer Raivo Aunap.
FOTO: MARGUS ANSU

As African countries once again ask why the world’s most common wall maps make their continent look so much smaller than it does on a globe, the dispute may at first sound like a technical quibble.
In reality, it is largely about whose world appears large, central, and important on the map.

The Mercator projection severely distorts the relative sizes of areas at different latitudes.
Areas near the North and South Poles appear greatly enlarged, while those around the equator look comparatively small.

According to Aunap, this is hardly a new dispute.
“This battle has been going on for a long time — a search for the most accurate projection.
What is clear is that African countries are unhappy with how their relative sizes are represented on many maps.
On a globe, they generally look considerably larger.”

The Mercator projection, used here for comparison, severely distorts the relative sizes of areas at different latitudes.
Areas near the North and South Poles appear greatly enlarged, while those around the equator look comparatively small.
Greenland, for example, looks strikingly imposing on a Mercator map — roughly the same size as Africa — even though Africa’s actual land area is more than ten times larger.

Round Two of an Old Debate

The same issue gained global attention in the 1970s through the work of German historian Arno Peters.
Peters linked the proportions on conventional maps to European power and worldviews and proposed an equal-area projection now known as the Peters projection.
It preserves the relative areas of countries and continents but significantly stretches their shapes.

“We are now in the second round of this match, with an effort to make the global public more aware of the issue: please show countries’ areas in more accurate proportion,” Aunap says, summing up the debate.

 

A world map in the Gall-Peters projection—an image of Africa that is more “palatable” to the continent’s countries and peoples.
FOTO: KUVATÕMMIS

From a cartographer’s perspective, however, he finds the choice of audience for these demands puzzling.
Google Maps’ standard map view still uses the Mercator projection; its globe view offers a very different picture of the Earth.
“Strangely enough, the African Union did not approach major corporations such as Apple or Google to ask them to make the globe the default view.
Instead, it approached the UN and the World Bank, neither of which is directly involved in cartography,” he says.
For cartographers, he argues, this is preaching to the choir: the problem has long been understood, and various solutions already exist.

That does not mean a single click can produce the one true map.
“From a cartographer’s perspective, there is no single correct map.
What makes a projection the right one? It’s like food: you have one thing today, then something different tomorrow, somewhere else or with different people.”

A map’s purpose determines what it needs to preserve.
Some maps must preserve local angles, others areas, distances, or directions.

A map’s purpose determines what it needs to preserve.
Some maps must preserve local angles, others areas, distances, or directions.
Still others simply need to tell the story of a particular phenomenon quickly and clearly.
Preserving the areas of continents often leaves oceans stretched into unfamiliar shapes; keeping coastlines familiar distorts the relative sizes of landmasses.

Even the basic concepts behind the Mercator projection are difficult to grasp without some geometry.
“It is described as conformal, meaning it preserves angles and does not distort shapes.
So a circle should remain a circle, right? But if we draw a large circle on a globe—say, one with a radius of 5,000 kilometers—and then put it on a Mercator projection, it no longer looks like a circle.
Where is the correct shape, then? Where is the correct angle?” Aunap asks.
“The mathematics of mapping can often be rather complicated, and explaining it to the public is just as challenging.”

Who Is at the Center of the World?

A projection is more than a technical compromise; it is also a perspective.
A map can deliberately highlight connections that are not immediately apparent on a globe.
Aunap describes how a particular projection can make the world’s great mountain ranges — the Andes, the North American Cordillera, and the mountain ranges of Asia — appear to line up along a single axis.
They do not actually align that way on a globe, but this image offers a way to approach the world with a new question.
“Searching for projections and solutions like these is common: looking for a fresh perspective on the world.”

That perspective is just as evident in the choice of a world map’s center.
Maps commonly used in the United States often split Eurasia at the edges, placing the Americas in the middle.
Aunap sees nothing unusual or shameful in this.
“Putting your own country, your own territory, at the center is perfectly normal — a matter of self-respect.
Why should I use a projection centered on Europe’s prime meridian when I’m in America? That leaves me somewhere out on the edge, all twisted out of shape.
No, of course I’ll put America in the center.”

A projection is more than a technical compromise; it is also a perspective.
A map can deliberately highlight connections that are not immediately apparent on a globe.

Africa already occupies a geographically central position: both the equator and the prime meridian run through the continent.
Chinese maps, meanwhile, center on the Pacific Ocean, with China on one side and the Americas on the other.
“The Chinese look toward the Pacific.
Their world is not centered on Europe,” Aunap notes.

Geographers at the University of Tartu even have their own “Estonia-centric” projection, with Estonia at its center; the design has also become the geography department’s logo.
When mapping countries and regions, cartographers often place the central meridian through their own country to make its shape and proportions look as natural as possible.
Estonia’s national coordinate system, L-EST 97, uses 24 degrees east as its central meridian and, according to Aunap, is suitable for mapping the entire Baltic region.

“It’s a matter of choice,” he says, but adds that those choices can serve broader purposes.
“Cartography offers considerable scope for constructing imaginary systems and exerting political influence: portraying others in an unfavorable light or presenting yourself more favorably.” A map can be a peacock feather in a nation’s self-image, but also a tool for shaping perceptions of an adversary or a disputed territory.

When Maps Became State Secrets

The political significance of maps extends beyond projections.
This was particularly evident in the Soviet Union, where a map could be both a precise working tool and a source of tightly restricted knowledge.

Aunap recalls how his own interest in geography began with maps from Estonia’s prewar independence era that he received from his great-uncle.
“He gave me those old Estonian maps, which I copied onto tracing paper.
That sparked my curiosity: oh, so this is our territory, our country, our roads and villages.” During the Soviet era, however, ordinary people were often denied access to that knowledge.

“Highly accurate maps of the Soviet Union were produced.
They were topographic maps.
The trouble was that ordinary people couldn’t access them.” The public mostly saw tourist maps and other simplified maps, which had to be distorted to conceal secret facilities and, especially, precise coordinate systems.
Aunap recalls that as late as 1955, a map was published in Estonian that he considers broadly accurate.

Relatively accurate maps remained publicly available in the Soviet Union into the 1950s.
Then, with the advent of ballistic missiles, the accuracy of global coordinates became a strategic concern.
“To avoid revealing precise coordinates for any given area, they began distorting maps intended for public use.” Villages could be shifted, and ports in the Far East or along the Arctic Ocean could be shown in the wrong locations.
Even the otherwise accurate Soviet topographic maps omitted Tartu’s airfield: that information appeared on separate maps.

Relatively accurate maps remained publicly available in the Soviet Union into the 1950s.
Then, with the advent of ballistic missiles, precise global coordinates became a strategic concern.

Aunap recalls that one center of map distortion was in Riga, home to an important institution: Map Factory No.
5.
Geography students from Tartu State University also completed internships there, and the factory produced tourist maps.

Aunap cannot say whether the instructions to distort maps came from Riga or Moscow.
But he describes the technique: cartographers started with an already heavily generalized base map, often a wall map, and added details.
The aim was to make the overall picture as difficult as possible to piece together.
One solution was to publish route maps showing, for example, the road from Tallinn toward Narva and its immediate surroundings, but not the country as a whole.

Other countries also kept military facilities secret.
British mapmakers, too, had a list of sites that could not be shown, including submarine bases.
“But distorting tourist maps in this way was largely an Eastern Bloc practice,” Aunap says.

Secrecy itself, however, long predates the Cold War.
Aunap cites Egyptian burial chambers, which were concealed from ordinary people, and map censorship in the Russian Empire.
Even the atlas compiled by Count Ludwig August Mellin (1754–1835) was banned under one czar and permitted again under the next.
In times of political tension, the authorities were reluctant to give potential adversaries—Prussia, Austria-Hungary, or anyone else—too much information about the empire’s western territories.
“But generally, the aim was still to make maps as accurate as possible.”

Map sheet of Paldiski County from Ludwig August Mellin’s Atlas of Livonia (1791–1810). 

FOTO: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

The inaccuracies of old maps generally reflected the limits of knowledge rather than political deception.
Early maps by Olaus Magnus (1490–1557), Gerardus Mercator (1512–1594), and Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598) show our region heavily distorted because geodetic surveying and triangulation networks were not yet sufficiently developed.
“These maps were, after all, compiled using approximate information,” Aunap says.

A Usefully Distorted Map

Distortion on a map, then, is not necessarily an error.
Medieval sailors used portolan charts, which exaggerated prominent capes, islands, and other landmarks so navigators could recognize them.
“A map has always been a practical tool,” Aunap says.

A portolan chart is a hand-drawn nautical chart originating in Southern Europe and dating from the 13th century or later.
These charts are remarkable for their detailed coastlines, which approach the level of detail found on modern maps.

The word “portolan” comes from the Italian portolano, meaning a guide or instructions for reaching ports, and the Latin portus, meaning harbor.
Originally, portolans were not maps but written accounts containing sailors’ accumulated knowledge of ports, distances, bearings, and sailing directions.
Lo compasso da navigare, dating from the mid-13th century, is the oldest known compilation of sailing directions.

Subway maps distort geography to make routes, stations, and connections easier to follow.

PHOTO: SCREENSHOT

The same logic applies to modern subway maps.
Their lines generally do not reflect a city’s actual angles, distances, or even compass directions, but connections, stations, and travel options are easy to follow.
“If you plotted it on a globe at its actual scale and in the correct directions, many people might be very surprised to find that it looks nothing like that — it is, in fact, heavily distorted.” Yet it is a highly effective tool for travelers.

Roman road maps, such as the Peutinger Map, followed a similar principle.
Europe could not fit onto a papyrus scroll in its true proportions, so roads and distances between cities were compressed into a network of lines on a narrow strip.
This, Aunap suggests, offers another way to think about the saying that all roads lead to Rome: making routes easy to follow mattered more than preserving geographical shapes.

Reading a map is a skill in its own right.
Aunap has taken part in orienteering and prefers a paper map to the narrow view of a navigation app.
“With in-car navigation, you drive like a horse wearing blinders: I see only the route ahead and where I need to turn.
But a map gives me the big picture.
I can judge how far I have left to go, what’s nearby, and how far away it is.” That broader view makes it possible to choose another route, detour around dense brush, or assess what else lies ahead.

Even teaching map-reading was difficult in Soviet Estonia because good maps were unavailable.
Orienteers initially used hand-drawn maps, often based on unreliable information; later, more accurate competition maps were secretly produced from Soviet maps.
Aunap estimates that map-based orienteering probably began in Estonia in the 1950s.
To the authorities, someone moving through the forest with a map could look suspicious, especially near a border zone or missile base.
Orienteering was also presented as preparation for defending the Soviet state, under the auspices of the VTK program — an acronym meaning “Ready for Labor and Defense of the Homeland.”

Borders, Names, and Disputed Land

On a map, shapes are not the only things open to dispute; lines and names are, too.
Aunap cites the depiction of Petseri County within the borders established by the Treaty of Tartu, the territorial disputes involving China, Pakistan, and India in Kashmir, and the dispute between Japan and Russia over the Kuril Islands.
“All kinds of geopolitical spheres of influence have been drawn on maps.
It is quite common to want to demonstrate who considers a particular territory their own.”

Names raise another question: whose language and community does a map recognize? In Scandinavia, Sámi place names have gained official status.
For Estonians, Finno-Ugric place names in territories now within Russia also matter, and changes to those names through Russian usage can be painful.
For a cartographer, this is more than a spelling decision: it is a choice between making something visible and erasing it.

The same applies to the naming dispute over the Gulf of Mexico.
Aunap prefers to follow broader, long-established usage.
“If we don’t want to flatter anyone, we should show it the way the sensible international public does.
It is the Gulf of Mexico.
We have no reason to jump from one sandbox to another because of decisions made overnight.”

He is cautious when describing Google’s labeling: as he last understood it, users elsewhere in the world still saw the Gulf of Mexico under its existing name, while users in the United States saw a different one.
On the Estonian-language version of Google Maps, however, the gulf appears under both names.

Google Maps currently splits the difference: Gulf of Mexico, with Gulf of America in parentheses.

FOTO: GOOGLE MAPS

Science, Art, and Attention to Detail

Mapping skills developed alongside culture and the ability to travel.
Aunap is certain that Estonia’s coastal communities knew how to navigate: Vikings from Saaremaa reached Gotland and probably Sigtuna as well.
Old words for compass directions may reflect the reference points people used to find their way.
Near the coast, it was enough to know where the land, reefs, shoals, or fishing grounds were.

Inland, ordinary people traveled less; the knowledge needed for longer journeys was held mainly by merchants and other more mobile groups.
In ancient times, military expeditions may have relied on knowledge of routes into Latvia and perhaps farther afield.
This spatial knowledge was largely topological: a road led from here to the next stronghold, and from there to another.
It was not necessarily a drawn map, but it provided a workable guide.

Today’s satellites, lidar, and digital geospatial data have made mapping almost unimaginably precise.
“The advances we are seeing now are truly phenomenal,” says Aunap, who could not have imagined anything like Google’s mapping tools when he began his university studies.

The great age of exploration — which also included the mapping of Antarctica by expeditions such as Bellingshausen’s — established the world’s basic outlines, but the journey of discovery is not over.
In Estonia, lidar maps have revealed at least one hillfort in Rapla County, Sõtke Kantsimägi; several have recently been discovered in Latvia.
The same data reveal World War II defensive trenches, bomb craters on the Pakri Islands, and Great Northern War fortifications near the Sinimäed Hills.
The abundance of maps of Earth, the Moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies does not mean there is only one way to represent reality, Aunap says.

Lidar and new layers of map data also offer evidence for those asking how to demonstrate Earth’s shape to someone who cannot see the entire planet from an airplane.
Aunap suggests that the flat-Earth idea probably began as a joke but was taken up by others, and there are still people who reject established knowledge.
In his view, cartography, exploration, and increasingly precise measurements form a vast, interconnected body of evidence.

Yet abundant data do not automatically make a good map.
Discussing a new wall map from the Estonian Land and Spatial Development Board, the interviewer noted that some newer settlements were missing and that the meanings of the county colors were unexplained.
Aunap had seen the map on social media but had not examined a physical copy in detail, so he was reluctant to offer a definitive assessment.
Still, he says, while geospatial data are now readily available and assembling a map is technically straightforward, a good result requires more.

Lidar and new layers of map data also provide evidence for those asking how to demonstrate Earth’s shape to someone who cannot see the entire planet from an airplane.

Estonia has publicly available administrative, settlement, and topographic data that can support excellent work.
“The question is simply who was given the assignment: take these administrative boundary data and make a map.
Perhaps they were in a hurry or lacked something else — time, for instance.”

Seemingly trivial mistakes can creep into mapmaking.
A cartographer may temporarily move the name of a place or body of water off to the side while working on the layout, then forget to delete it.
“We’re labeling the Gulf of Riga and then the Gulf of Finland, so we drag ‘Gulf of Riga’ off to one side in the mapping software.
But then it gets left hanging there.
Later, someone discovers that you’ve put the Gulf of Riga in the middle of Viljandi County,” Aunap says by way of illustration.

This brings him back to the essence of cartography.
“Making a proper map requires professionalism and dedication.” He puts it even more directly: “Cartography is, in part, an art.
There’s a pinch of science and technology, but certainly a great deal of art.”

Civil engineer Charles Joseph Minard’s map of Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 Russian campaign.
The graphic is remarkable for displaying six types of data in two dimensions: troop strength, distance, temperature, latitude and longitude, direction of movement, and location on specific dates.
American professor of statistics and computer science Edward Tufte describes it as possibly the best statistical graphic ever drawn.
FOTO: KUVATÕMMIS

That artistry is evident in both large world maps and simplified thematic maps.
France can be represented as a hexagon, with Paris, major transportation links, and waterways added; its precise coastline is unnecessary.
What matters is clearly conveying how a territory or phenomenon works.
Aunap traces the development of thematic cartography and infographics to the 18th century, when printing and the visual presentation of numerical data began advancing rapidly.
That tradition also includes Charles Joseph Minard’s (1781–1870) famous maps of Napoleon’s Russian campaign, in which troop strength, direction of movement, and losses tell a story of both war and geography.

A map can be a precise measuring instrument, a political statement, a navigator’s tool, a military secret, or a work of art.
None of these roles is inherently wrong.
The question is whether mapmakers acknowledge their choices — and whether viewers know how to recognize them.
The world cannot be flattened without distortion.
That is precisely why we must ask whose scale and whose perspective we are using to view it.

Britain urges ships to prepare for life without reliable GPS

Eutelsat

 

From Splash by Sam Chalmers

Britain has warned shipowners that satellite navigation can no longer be taken for granted in some of the world’s busiest shipping regions, urging crews to practise navigating without GPS as jamming and spoofing become increasingly widespread.

In a new Marine Guidance Note, MGN 719, the UK’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) warns that interference across the Baltic, Black Sea, Middle East Gulf and parts of East Asia means satellite-derived positioning, navigation and timing information can no longer be relied upon everywhere.

The warning extends well beyond electronic charts.
The agency identifies a long list of potentially vulnerable equipment, including ECDIS, AIS, autopilots, dynamic positioning systems, radar, gyrocompasses and GMDSS communications equipment.
Ashore, vessel traffic services, pilotage systems, port management platforms and automated logistics systems are also exposed.

The financial implications are considerable.
Citing earlier UK government research, the MCA estimates that a seven-day GNSS outage could cost the British maritime economy £1.5bn ($2bn), including £1.3bn in port operations alone.

• 
  

Photo: ID 348035725 | Satellite Ships © Dragoscondrea | Dreamstime.com

 

The guidance urges operators to identify precisely which systems depend on satellite-derived data, establish procedures for detecting interference and regularly drill crews in alternative navigation methods.
Radar fixing, visual bearings, celestial navigation and dead reckoning are all recommended.

The notice follows growing evidence that satellite navigation interference is becoming a routine operational hazard rather than an occasional inconvenience in conflict zones.

Maritime intelligence firm Windward’s latest figures show an average of 5,131 GPS jamming incidents a day during the third quarter, with more than 124,000 individual vessels affected.

Research published earlier this year by the Royal Institute of Navigation found that 14% of survey respondents had experienced an unsafe or unlawful situation resulting from GNSS interference.

In July, SplashTech reported on a government questionnaire, believed to have originated in Britain, asking ship operators whether their crews had conducted GNSS-denial drills, understood the vulnerabilities of interconnected bridge equipment and could operate ECDIS in dead-reckoning mode.

More recently, SplashTech reported how four tankers in the Black Sea had apparently broadcast positions placing them in Lima, Peru, more than 12,000 km away.
Separate monitoring identified 1,702 impossible position jumps involving 379 vessels in the Gulf of Oman over a single week in September.

The UK is investing in a terrestrial navigation backup through its enhanced Loran, or eLoran, programme, but the MCA’s latest guidance makes clear that technological alternatives will take time to become widely available.

Britain’s planned eLoran network is not expected to provide an initial timing capability until 2028, with full positioning and navigation services targeted for 2030.

 

Links :

• Indexbox : UK MCA Warns Satellite Navigation Unreliable in Key Shipping Regions

Bristish Isles & misc layer update in the GeoGarage platform

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He reached the Americas centuries before Columbus. Why doesn’t he get more credit?

"Leiv Eiriksson Discovering America," by the Norwegian artist Christian Krohg, from the National Museum of Art in Oslo. 

A version of the painting by the artist's son, Per Krohg, hangs in the U.S.
Capitol. 

(Heritage Images/Getty Images)

From The Washington Post by By Matthew Hay Brown

Accounts of Leif Erikson’s voyage to present-day Canada were known to Europeans in Christopher Columbus’s time.


For the explorers from ice-covered Greenland, it must have seemed a paradise.
A genuinely green land of lush meadows irrigated by free-flowing rivers.
Whales and caribou to hunt, nesting birds and wild salmon to catch, grapes and wheat to gather.
A warmer climate, with more daylight and milder winters.

These Norsemen and women, led by the Viking Leif Erikson, built a year-round outpost believed to be a station for ship repair and staging ground for voyages farther south.
They fought and traded with Indigenous peoples.
At least one woman gave birth.

They named it Vinland.

Today, it’s called Newfoundland, in Atlantic Canada.
The Norse arrived in the year 1000, give or take a decade — half a millennium before a certain other European explorer first landed in the Bahamas.

So why, on Monday, does the United States observe Columbus Day?

‘Columbus had better PR’

Christopher Columbus, bearing sword and banner, claims the island known by its natives as Guanahani for Spain in this 1893 lithograph.
It's believed to be San Salvador in the present-day Bahamas.

(Library of Congress)

Christopher Columbus never set foot on the North American continent.
It wasn’t until after his death that Juan Ponce de León became the first European to reach what is now the United States.Ask The Post AIDive deeper

“Columbus had better PR,” says John Steinberg, an archeologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Much of what’s understood about the Norse presence in North America comes from the Vinland Sagas, a pair of 13th-century Icelandic works of genealogy, stories and navigational data that was uncorroborated until the discovery of Norse artifacts in Newfoundland in the 1960s.

Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the Americas in 1492, by contrast, was detailed by the contemporary writer Bartolomé de las Casas, a lawyer and Dominican friar working in part from Columbus’s own logs.

“The Vinland Sagas are stories told around a campfire,” Steinberg says.
“We have legends and archeology but no real history.
...
With Columbus, someone writes the story from his point of view.”

An Italian American heritage day

 

A Columbus Day parade in Wausau, Wisconsin, in 1892, 400 years after his voyage.

(Wisconsin Historical Society/Getty Images)

The Genoan navigator also benefited from a strong Italian American lobby, during a period when Italian immigrants to the United States were subjected to sometimes violent discrimination.

Columbus Day is first known to have been celebrated in New York on Oct. 12, 1792, the 300th anniversary of his landfall.
The first distinctly Italian American observance came in 1866.

In 1891, a mob in New Orleans lynched 11 Italian immigrants.
Italy severed diplomatic relations with the United States.
The following year, President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed Oct. 12 a national holiday.
Lobbying by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal order, and prominent Italian Americans eventually led to its proclamation as a federal holiday in 1937 by President Franklin D.
Roosevelt.

In reaching the Americas, Columbus and those who followed him brought slavery, disease and death to the native population, and academics and activists in recent years have called for an end to the holiday.

In 1989, as the 500th anniversary of his first voyage approached, South Dakota, home to nine federally recognized tribes, replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day.

More than a dozen states and the District of Columbia have followed suit.
Joe Biden in 2021 became the first president to proclaim Indigenous Peoples’ Day, alongside Columbus Day.

President Donald Trump, whose administration has pushed to scrub federal institutions of what it calls “corrosive ideology” — including policies or programs recognizing historical oppression and racism — last year signed a presidential proclamation to recognize Columbus as “the original American hero.”

Trump last year proclaimed that he was “bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes,” though many places had never stopped celebrating it.

Corroborating the sagas

L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, where the remnants of a Norse settlement were found in 1960, is a Canadian National Historic Site and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

(Science Source)

For centuries, the Norse claim to have reached Americas rested on the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red, sometimes contradictory works written some 250 years after the events they depict.

As history, the sagas can be problematic.
Alongside plausible descriptions of Viking life on land and at sea, they recount, for example, the time that the recently deceased Thorstein Erikson sits up to speak to his widow.
Also the mortal wounding of Thorvald Erikson by a one-legged creature, and the natives who elude Norse capture by vanishing.
(Leif, Thorstein and Thorvald were all sons of the explorer Erik the Red.)

But as navigational guides, historian Eleanor Barraclough says, the sagas are remarkably helpful.
“Part of it is the stuff you need to know to survive out in the world, which is directions and how to get across seas,” says Barraclough, author of “Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas.” 

“And so that material is really quite neatly mapped.”

It was the sagas that pointed the Norwegian husband-and-wife team of explorer Helge Ingstad and archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad to L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern shore of Newfoundland, where in 1960 they discovered traces of a Norse settlement — the first evidence of European contact with the Americas before Columbus.

Found at the site were the remnants of eight sod-and-wood structures — three longhouses that could have housed scores of people, an iron forge and several workshops — identical to those the Vikings built in Iceland and Greenland, and artifacts including bone needles, iron nails, ship rivets and a bronze ring-headed cloak pin.

Researchers using carbon dating estimated the outpost to have been in use at some point between 990 and 1050.
In 2021, scientists at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands used a new method — counting tree rings from the radiocarbon signature left by a solar disturbance known to have occurred in 993 — to date three pieces of wood hewn there to 1021.

L’Anse aux Meadows is now a Canadian National Historic Site with artifacts, replica buildings and historical interpreters, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

What were Vikings doing in Newfoundland?

We don’t know, precisely, but we can theorize.
The Norse were known to have ranged as far south as the Mediterranean and as far east as Kievan Rus’, present-day Russia.
To build ships, they needed lumber, a commodity scarce in Iceland and Greenland.

According to the Saga of the Greenlanders, the Icelandic merchant Bjarni Herjólfsson, blown off course while attempting to reach Erik the Red’s settlement in Greenland, was the first Norseman to sight Vinland.
Leif Erikson, intrigued by Herjólfsson’s stories of a forested land, bought his ship and attempted to retrace his steps.

With a crew of 35, he found territory he called Helluland (Land of Flat Stones), believed to be present-day Baffin Island in the Canadian territory of Nunavut; Markland (Land of Forest), believed to be Labrador; and Vinland (Land of Wine).

The outpost at L’Anse aux Meadows might have been one in a network of sites used by the Norse throughout the year, as in Greenland and Iceland.
“They would have summer dairy stations, fishing stations,” Steinberg says.

The relatively modest accommodations, lack of burial sites and comparatively shallow midden pile — waste dump — all suggest that it was not intended as a permanent settlement.

“It’s an outpost,” Barraclough says.
“They’re using that place as a sort of springboard so they can spend their winters mending ships and then they can keep going further inland.”

Among the most compelling finds at the site are butternut shells.
Butternut trees don’t grow naturally in Newfoundland.
Their presence suggests that the Norse ventured farther south, perhaps to the Saint Lawrence River Valley or New Brunswick, or at least traded with people who did.

According to the sagas, the Norse had both friendly and violent encounters with Indigenous peoples.

A notable figure in the sagas is Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, the widow of Thorstein Erikson.
She is said to have remarried and given birth to a son, Snorri, believed to be the first child of European descent born on the North American mainland; attempted a conversation with an Indigenous woman; and, after converting to Christianity, made a pilgrimage to Rome.

It’s unclear how long the Norse remained in contact with Vinland.
Scientists conjecture sporadic visits over decades.
Barraclough notes a 14th-century report of a ship blown off course from Markland — Labrador — turning up in Iceland.

“And so even in the 1300s,” she says, “it seems quite plausible that there are at least foraging expeditions, because Greenland doesn’t have an awful lot of wood, and the Norse really do need wood for the type of lifestyle that they’re trying to keep going.”

The campaign for Leif Erikson Day

 

A statue of Erikson in Reykjavik, Iceland. 

(Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images)

As 19th-century Italian Americans began lobbying for Columbus Day, so Scandinavians sought recognition for Leif Erickson Day.
The movement was fueled by the 1874 publication of “America Not Discovered by Columbus” by Rasmus B. Anderson, a professor of Scandinavian studies at the University of Wisconsin and later a U.S. ambassador to Denmark.

Though overbroad in its claims — Anderson writes of Leif Erikson’s travel to present-day New England, for which no evidence has been found — the work helped to popularize the idea of the Norse “discovery” of the Americas.
In 1925, President Calvin Coolidge, speaking to a group of Norwegian Americans on the 100th anniversary of the arrival of Norwegian immigrants in New York Harbor, called Erikson the discoverer of America.

Soon, Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, all home to substantial Scandinavian American populations, declared Leif Erikson days.
President Lyndon Johnson followed with a national holiday in 1964, proclaimed by every president since.
It’s celebrated today principally in the Upper Midwest.

As it was on Friday.
It falls each Oct. 9 — not a date from Erikson’s life, but the anniversary of the arrival of those 1825 immigrants.
And, conveniently, a few days before that other explorer’s day.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : 11 of History's most famous sea voyages / The Viking woman who sailed to America and walked .. / Image of the week : discovering America / Ancient documents suggest Italian sailors knew of America 150 ... / Colombus and the Piri Reis map of 1513
  

What about the nautical chart content?

 Figure 3: Very detailed bathymetric information on a Transit ENC (compilation scale 90,000) displayed on SEAiq Pilot. 

The area is also covered by ENCs at compilation scales 45,000 and 22,000. (Image courtesy: Shom)

 

From Hydro by Christian Mouden, SHOM

Why the transition to S-101 is a unique review opportunity

Hydrographic offices (HOs) are preparing their transition into the new S-100 era. 

This will require them to scheme different S-100 products that will be used in future ECDIS systems, set up the production, validation and distribution processes, train staff and so on.

The imminent transition from S-57 to S-101 offers a unique opportunity to review and optimize the content of nautical charts for modern navigation. 

This article focuses on the use of electronic navigational charts (ENCs) in ECDIS systems, while recognizing the increasing use of ENCs on electronic chart systems (ECS) for non-SOLAS navigation.

For the past 30 years or so, mariners have been using official S-57 ENCs on their ECDIS systems, supporting safety of life at sea (SOLAS).

The primary goal for HOs was to provide ENC coverage of the main maritime routes as quickly as possible.

That is why S-57 ENCs have almost always been produced by digitizing all the information on paper charts that formed national portfolios, with content dating back many decades or more.

While these ENCs were indeed new digital products, they were certainly not newly charted information (see Figure 1).

It was customary at the time to portray the maximum amount of information on the entire chart extent, and the content was designed with the sole purpose of being printed at certain scales and used accordingly by the mariner.

Obviously, it was not considered for use on an ECDIS. This ‘show all’ compilation method is defined as ‘full depiction’ in the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) S-4 standard.

Full depiction is applied on the largest-scale charts, with the aim of showing as much information as space permits.

Figure 1: Shom chart 6540 (published in 1970) and the equivalent ENC FR565400 displayed on SEAiq Pilot. (Image courtesy: Shom)

In reality, charted information (topographic features, bathymetric data, etc) varies considerably, not only from one HO to another but also over time within a single HO – and it can even depend on an individual cartographer’s interpretation.

The overall result can be very dense, with charts showing detail in areas where the mariner is not intended to navigate, or information of no benefit to navigation.

This often leads to ECDIS screen clutter. SCAMIN attribution, which is encoded on most of the ENC objects, is intended to optimize the display when the mariner zooms out by reducing clutter.

However, the current optional implementation by most HOs is not optimum and can certainly be improved.

The qualities of a good chart

In the case of the ENC specifically, being free of validation check errors (IHO S-58 standard) does not necessarily mean it is a high-quality product.

While S-58 validation checks ensure the digital product is consistent with the IHO ENC Product Specification, they do not consider the three basic qualities of a nautical chart:

1. It must be safe. 

This is the responsibility of the producing authority.

It is worth noting that safe does not mean, for instance, that the chart has been entirely compiled from recent surveys conducted with modern techniques.

Rather, it means that the overall charted features – including metadata on the quality of surveys (typically CATZOC attribute) or position accuracy attribute POSACC – provide the mariners with ad-hoc information so that they can appreciate the accuracy of the depth information in any area and adjust their routes and ECDIS look-ahead settings accordingly.

2. It must meet user requirements.

This means that the chart content is optimized with regard to the navigational purpose and the complexity of the area.

The chart content must also be adjusted depending on the possible existence of larger-scale charts in the area.

3. It must be easy to read. 

This quality is sometimes overlooked.

The best illustration of this is probably the density of soundings, which is often very high, even in areas with a relatively regular seabed with few significant shoals.

When displayed on the ECDIS, this makes it difficult to distinguish the objects that are most helpful for navigation.

The situation often becomes critical when text is displayed; then, screen clutter reaches saturation point.

It is important that HOs avoid producing unnecessarily crowded charts, recognizing that mariners often do not fully understand the technical content of the charts.

For example, S-4 standard includes some detailed charting rules that the mariner may be ignorant of. The recent merging of abbreviations for ‘Position Approximate’ and ‘Position Doubtful’ (PA/PD) offers a good example of how charts can be made easier to read for mariners. Keeping charts as simple as possible facilitates their task

 Less information also significantly reduces the number of features in the ECDIS pick report.

More generalization for more efficiency

Generalization is the cartographic process used to produce a smaller-scale chart from a larger-scale one. Nautical chart generalization principles are described in the S-4 standard, which provides basic guidance to cartographers on the levels of detail to be retained according to the navigational purpose of the chart.

S-4 also mentions that some vessels might not carry all the largest-scale charts and may be forced by unplanned circumstances (e.g. bad weather) to approach the coast or shelter using a smaller-scale chart.

For this reason, according to S-4, omission of details on smaller scales should be considered carefully. Although this is valid for paper chart navigation, the situation is different for SOLAS vessels that have the capacity to acquire ENCs on demand.

Apart from the full depiction provided on larger-scale charts and the generalization that should be applied on smaller-scale ones, the S-4 standard also allows the use of minimal depiction.

This is an extreme case of generalization that omits most features in an area, even though space is available to show some of them.

This process could be used more frequently on small-scale ENCs in specific areas such as estuaries or harbours.

On current charts, generalization is often minimal; many small-scale charts show detailed information, even in areas that are covered by larger scales.

Is there a need to show detailed information close to the shore on a ENC for transit navigation? Minimal depiction areas should be preferred in such cases (see Figure 4).

This would make charts easier to read and would also reduce the volume of the digital files.

S-101: a unique opportunity

The transition to S-101 is challenge for data providers as they will have to convert their existing S-57 data (or rather S-57 database, in some cases) to S-101.

Although this conversion will be an automated process executed using mapping files, it will require a careful initial review and consolidation of existing data to minimize both potential conversion issues and post-conversion edits of S-101 data.

This necessary preparation can be a huge task, but it is also a unique and perfect opportunity to review chart content so that it completely fits the actual needs of modern navigation.

Apart from the general chart content described above, HOs can also take advantage of this opportunity to review their national portfolios, such as by:

• optimizing the number of scales used
• reviewing the S-57 encoding to reduce the number of alarms on the ECDIS (this has been a constant complaint from mariners)
• encoding more depth contours than traditionally, especially in port areas where the seabed is not evolutive and where S-102 products (bathymetric surface) will not be necessary or available
• reviewing areas encoded with a CATZOC value ‘Unassessed’
• replacing qualitative accuracy attributes such as QUAPOS with quantitative attributes that can be used by the ECDIS look-ahead functionality

By reducing the number of features, optimized chart content will facilitate S-57 data conversion to S-101.

For HOs, this not only means a lighter workload for the conversion, validation and S-101 data post-conversion edits, but will also significantly reduce the necessary updates once the charts have been published.

Too heavy a task?

Hydrographic Offices may very well argue that the S-57 to S-101 conversion is already a challenge and that they do not have the resources to review their entire chart portfolio content.

This is only partly true.

Before changing the chart portfolio content, it will of course be necessary to define the new chart content.

Once these principles have been agreed, digital data and existing tools will allow a high level of automation.

It is possible to automate the reduction of sounding density, or remove specific features in selected areas, for instance. Ideally, this should be done before converting the data to S-101.

Nations with small ENC portfolios will be able to optimize their chart content ‘manually’.

Other producers can take advantage of existing tools to reduce the resources necessary to accomplish their chart modernization.

Conclusion

Although it may be out of scope for most hydrographic offices, they should at least consider rationalizing their nautical chart portfolio and content.

For HOs, this is a long-term investment to reduce their chart maintenance workload.

At this point in time, it is also a unique opportunity to ultimately better address mariners’ real-world challenges and provide them with all the data they need specifically and only the data they need, to ensure safe and easy navigation on their ECDIS or ECS.

There is no doubt they will be grateful when they experience the results.