5 maps that help explain the Arctic

www.nationalgeographic-maps.com/1990-arctic-ocean-floor-map.html

(Arctic Ocean floor)

From GISgeography

 National Geographic atlases from 1999 through 2014 shows how Arctic ice has melted over time.

North Pole Map
Many nations are using bathymetric data (which maps the seafloor) to claim parts of the Arctic Ocean, including the North Pole. Russia, Canada, and Denmark have all expressed an interest in claiming the area around the pole as an extension of their continental shelves.

Map by Bill Rankin, National Geographic 

 

 Arctic Maps – Exploring the New & Unknown

What first comes to mind when you think of the Arctic?
Ice? Polar bears? Climate change?

It wasn’t until very recently that we’ve gotten a clearer picture of the Arctic.
But just what are we mapping in the Arctic?
Geographic boundaries, climate change, ecology, geology, trading routes, oil exploration, the natural environment and even the research that is taking place in the north of 60°.
Maps are one of the most effective forms of communication ever developed.
They chart territory, they’re practical and communicate ideas.

1907 North Pole Regions Map

(National Geographic) zoomed

So that’s why this list of Arctic maps is the best place to begin learning about the Arctic.
If you want answers about the Arctic, look no further.
These visually-inspiring Arctic maps will show you the way.

1. ArkGIS – Mapping the Arctic Landscape

In Norwegian, ArkGIS stands for Arktisk Geografisk Informasjons System.
The World Wildlife Fund delivers a webmap to simplify the Arctic. Stakeholders, decision makers and general public get the whole picture with the ArkGIS – Mapping the Arctic Landscape Webmap.
From economic boundaries to human activity.. to the natural environment… ArkGIS puts together piece-by-piece each element with its Arctic maps.

Boundaries:

• Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ): Canada, Norway, Russia, Denmark (via Greenland), and the United States (via Alaska) are limited to their economic adjacent to their coasts. The waters beyond is considered international water.

Human Activity:

• Shipping Routes: Shipping routes are observed using the satellite-based Automatic Identification System (AIS).
• Oil and Gas: Exploration and production wells used to retrieve underground petroleum or oil.

Natural Environment:

• Physical Oceanography: Bathymetry shows underwater depth of the ocean floor. The SRTM30 PLUS Grid with roughly 1 km grid resolution.
• Sea Ice and Snow: Variables like sea ice and snow cover is an important variable for scientists to understand the pace of climate change.

Ecology:

• Marine Mammals: Distribution and observations of marine animals are depicted for whales, seals, walruses and narwhals. It includes polar bear status and denning areas.
• Seabirds: This includes waterfowl, seabird and shorebird species richness.
• Fish: From Atlantic cod to Walleye Pollock, these layers show the probability of occurrence and observations for fish species.

2. ArMap: Arctic Research Mapping Application

Arctic research mapping

Have you ever wanted to tap into all the research in the Arctic?
Thousands of research projects are taking place in the Arctic.
This is why the Arctic Research Mapping Application was developed.
It supports Arctic science by displaying research projects, showing available data and exploring possible collaborations.
Projects range from biological, geological, meteorological to oceanography.
Arctic vegetation, glaciers, permafrost, terrestrial biomes and tree lines can be displayed.
The Arctic maps has ship tracks, medical facilities and arctic stations are available for reference.
Users can navigate to areas of interest and explore research projects by location, year, funding program, investigator, discipline, keywords, and other variables.

3. 1971 Arctic Ocean Floor

Early explorers thought the oceans were bottomless.
After the invention of the sonic depth finder, suddenly our view of the oceans changed.
They certainly weren’t bottomless… nor, were they flat.
The featureless ocean became dynamic with trenches, ridges and abyssal plains.
This Arctic Ocean Floor map first appeared in the October 1971 issue of National Geographic.
The detail is extraordinary of such submarine terrain as continental shelves, abyssal plains, ridges, and fracture zones.
Land masses and the ocean floor are illustrated in stunning relief in these Arctic maps.

4. Geologic Map of the Arctic

Canada’s Geo-mapping Frontiers project was initiated to improve geoscience knowledge in Canada’s north. Natural Resources Canada’s Geologic Map of the Arctic displays geologic structures of Canada’s Arctic north of 60°.
This Arctic map was compiled using simple photogeologic principles and visual interpretation from a variety of free data sources.
The data sets included enhanced magnetic data, LANDSAT imagery and topographic (DEM) data.

5. The Arctic Risk Map

The Arctic Risk Map is filled with base data from a variety of sources.
It offers meteorology, ocean, biological, wildlife, search and rescue, geographical and activity as map data.
But where these Arctic maps excel are in their environmental and safety indexes.

Environment Vulnerability Index: A location and season specific index for environmental vulnerability of marine resources with respect to oil spill as external stressor.
The vulnerability assessment was performed for the different ecological uses in about 100 areas of heightened ecological significance within the 17 Arctic Large Marine Ecosystems.

Arctic ocean bathymetry

The Safety and Operability Index (SOI): The SOI is based on risk influencing factors such as sea ice, visibility, temperature, distance from search and rescue, etc.
It gives an aggregated score for each Arctic region for safety and operability factors in these regions.
Values are compared with the benchmark chosen by Norwegian Sea.
The Arctic is in flux for ‘who’ is claiming ‘what’..
The US, Russia, Canada, Norway and Danish are all staking their territory.
But no one can tap the Arctic until all countries come to an agreement.
Mineral extraction, natural gas, as well as potential shortcuts for shipping routes – the Arctic may be one of the last great frontiers for human development.
NASA has some models forecasting ice-free summers in the Arctic Ocean.
Disappearing sea ice jeopardizes mammal populations like polar bears.
Polar bears have less time to hunt because of the early breakup of sea ice.
The result is a shrinking polar bear population.
Seals, walruses and seabirds have shorter periods for nesting and feeding.
Whether its human activity or the natural environment, these 5 Arctic maps help you truly understand the great North.

Redrawing the map

Links :

• Cryopolitics : Mapping and distorting the Arctic
• MasterMaps : Arctic ice monthly
• NOAA : Arctic bathymetry maps for Google Earth 

A map that may have led Columbus to America is finally being deciphered

This map of the world drawn by Henricus Martellus in about 1491 was donated to Yale in 1962.
Its faded condition (shown above) has stymied researchers for decades.
The multispectral image of the map (below) reveals text and details invisible to the naked eye.

 

From Gizmodo by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan

The primary way we share ideas today is the internet.

In the 15th century, it was cartography.

And now, researchers at Yale are giving us a glimpse of one of the most influential maps in history—parts of which, up until now, had been too faded and aged to read.

Henricus Martellus isn’t a name you’d recognize unless you’re interested in map history, but he played a role in some of the most important events of the early modern world, thanks to a map he drew in 1491.

It showed the world as Europe understood it, and scholars have long theorized that it gave Columbus the information he needed to find the New World (it also may have famously misinformed him about the location of Japan, today known as the Bahamas).

That a map could survive 500 years—524 years, to be exact—is pretty amazing.

But much of the text on the 6-foot-wide map has been lost to history thanks to wear and tear.

Since the map came to Yale in the 1960s, researchers have tried to decipher hundreds of words and shapes that were too faded to read.

 Text in the southern Asia portion of the map describes the "Panotii" people, who purportedly had ears that were so large they could use them as sleeping bags.

It’s only within the past year that they’ve succeeded—thanks to improvements in multispectral imaging.

In Yale News, Michael Cummings explains how the technology has revealed hundreds of new words that seemed lost forever.

In his story, he explains how a team at Yale is using multispectral imaging to see through the ancient haze: The process captures images of the map at 12 different light frequencies which, when processed using imaging algorithms, reveal words and figures where our eyes see nothing.

Cummings was kind enough to send along higher-res versions of the maps’ new details, a few of which you’ll find below.

Read the full story here.

“Animals Different From Ours”

As Cummings explains, a lot of the text passages on the map describe not only local populations, but also the local wildlife of regions throughout the world—sometimes lifted from The Travels of Marco Polo.

For example, the passage below is warning of a monstrous creature today known as an Orca, which Yale says Martellus described as “a sea monster that is like the sun when it shines, whose form can hardly be described, except that its skin is soft and its body huge.”

 A text box in the Indian Ocean warns of the orca

 Another warns of “large wildernesses in which there are lions, large leopards, and many other animals different from ours:”

 Text found in northern Africa

Ethiopian Sources

Another cool detail revealed by the multispectral analysis?

That the way Martellus depicted Africa was actually based on African sources. According to Cummings, the way Africa is drawn on the map actually came from Ethiopian input—specifically, “three Ethiopian delegates to the Council of Florence in 1441.”

The council was called by the Pope—who invited the Ethiopian delegates, providing insight into how the African continent was shaped.

 The multispectral images show previously lost details in Martellus' depiction Africa that suggest the German cartographer used data from African sources, not European explorations.

A Map’s Lineage 

Again, cartography was a hugely important tool during the Age of Discovery.

Martellus’s map was based on others before it, and his map went on to influence how several other cartographers depicted the new world.

The multispectral images created by Yale give us a look at that heritage—the newly-uncovered words include some shared with a later map, by Martin Waldseemüller in 1507, suggesting Waldseemüller may have used this map to draw his own. 

We’ve written about Waldseemüller’s map before, actually: It was the first known cartographic rendering of America as a continent.

Of course, his 16th century America looks very different from our own. “America” is a long, thin peninsula that seems to stretch from Nova Scotia down to Florida.

Beyond that, neither Waldseemüller or Martellus could know.

It would take far longer to find out what existed in the blank patch of map—and even longer for us to figure out what they thought might exist there.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : A world redrawn : when America showed up on a map, it was the universe that got transformed / The making of a mysterious Renaissance map / Map Lab uncovering hidden text on a 500-year-old map that guided Columbus / Colombus and the Piri Reis map of 1513

Watch the first full-color HD videos of Earth from space

 Brisbane by Urthecast

It's no longer a challenge to get astonishingly sharp photos of the Earth from space, but video?
That's another matter.

UrtheCast is about to open the floodgates, however.
It just released the first batch of full-color, high-definition video of Earth recorded from the International Space Station.
In many ways, the extremely sharp footage (with detail down to 3.3 feet) of London is like an internet mapping site come to life -- all those pathways are suddenly full of moving boats and cars.

The Iris imaging system that recorded these movies won't be fully operational until the summer, but the preview suggests that its customers will get plenty of insights into traffic and other activity that's harder to track from the ground.

Links :

• Wired : Watch Earth in Live HD video from space this summer

Born like stars

An otherworldly underwater journey reveals the strangely celestial way in which a deep-sea squid gives birth.
Skip to 3:00 to jump right into the action, but watching the entire video from the start truly adds to the mystery and beauty of the whole experience.

Oil drilling in Arctic Ocean: A push into uncharted waters

 What would an oil spill in the Beaufort Sea look like ?

arcticspills.wwf.ca/#home/

From e360Yale by Ed Strukzik

As the U.S. and Russia take the first steps to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean, experts say the harsh climate, icy seas, and lack of infrastructure means a sizeable oil spill would be very difficult to clean up and could cause extensive environmental damage.

Last October, an unmanned barge with 950 gallons of fuel on board was in the Beaufort Sea when it broke free from the tug towing it.
The weather was stormy and the tug captain decided it was too dangerous to try to retrieve the barge in turbulent seas.

Ideally, the Canadian Coast Guard would have been on hand to deal with the situation.
But the icebreaker it routinely dispatches to the Beaufort Sea had gone back to Vancouver for the winter.
It would have taken a week for it to return.

 Arctic ocean in the GeoGarage platform

In the days that followed, powerful currents swept the barge into Alaskan waters.
The U.S. Coast Guard couldn’t do anything because its one operating icebreaker was stationed in Antarctica at the time.
Canadian and U.S. officials thought the barge would most likely be locked in the ice, or crushed by ice and sink.
It continued to drift, however, and when satellite observers checked last month the barge was about 40 miles off Russia’s Chukchi Peninsula.
Russian attempts to find the barge have been hampered, likely to due to bad weather.

As potential oil spills go, the barge incident is an extremely minor one.
But experts say that the errant barge should be a wake-up call for Arctic nations like the United States, Canada, Russia, Denmark, and Norway that are poised to ramp up shipping, as well as oil and gas drilling, in the Arctic.

Not only does the route of the ghost barge serve as a real-life demonstration of how spilled oil could move across the Arctic, it also illustrates how difficult it will be to contain and clean up oil in a region where roads, ports, airplanes, and icebreakers are few and far between.
In addition, scientists and engineers still don’t fully understand how chemical dispersants and oil collection agents might work in a cold climate, how ice conditions and ocean currents will influence the fate of spilled oil, and how well microbes in the Arctic are able to degrade the hydrocarbons, as they tend to do in warmer climates, such as during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

In 2012, WWF commissioned RPS Applied Science Associates, Inc. (RPS ASA) to evaluate different types of oil spills most likely to occur in the Beaufort Sea.

RPS ASA is a world leader in modelling the transport, fate, and biological effects of oil and chemical pollutants in marine environments.

Using cutting-edge computer modelling software, RSP ASA estimated the trajectory future possible oil spills associated with increased ship traffic and offshore petroleum exploration and development in the Beaufort Sea.

“Responding to an oil spill is extremely challenging in any marine environment,” says Paul Crowley, the Canadian director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Arctic Program. 

“Under Arctic conditions, it is much worse. A major spill would contaminate ice and shorelines for many thousands of kilometers, kill seabirds and mammals, and severely pollute the natural ecosystem that traditional [indigenous] users and wildlife rely upon.”

Crowley noted that the offshore operating season in the Arctic — and therefore the period when it would be possible to clean up an oil spill — is restricted to four to five months by darkness, heavy ice, and extreme cold.
These severe conditions would make it impossible to attempt an oil spill cleanup for half of the time during the operating season, and 100 percent of the time during the winter, Crowley and others say.

The issue of oil spill response in the Arctic has gained added attention since the Obama administration announced last month that it was giving conditional approval to Shell Oil to drill up to six exploratory wells in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska.
Although the U.S. is requiring Shell to abide by stringent safeguards — drilling only in shallow water and only in ice-free months, requiring the presence of a second oil rig to drill a relief well in case of a blowout — the administration’s decision nonetheless opens the door to drilling in U.S. Arctic waters.

Shell also is exploring Arctic oil-drilling opportunities in Russia, Greenland, and Norway.
The company says it is taking “extraordinary precautions” to drill safely and is collaborating closely with scientific organizations and governments in the region.

Using a supposedly ice-resistant platform, Russia has already begun drilling in the Arctic Ocean at the Prirazlomnoye oil field in the Pechora Sea off western Siberia.
These developments, experts warn, may be just the beginning of oil exploitation in a region that is unprepared to handle oil spills of any size.

There’s oil under them ‘bergs… 

Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Rob Huebert is senior research fellow at the Center for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary and a board member of the Canadian Polar Commission, which is responsible for monitoring and disseminating knowledge of the polar regions.
He is not alone in suggesting that the time to act on oil spill preparedness should come sooner rather than later because oil and gas drilling, as well as shipping in the Arctic, will inevitably accelerate.

In addition to Russia, Huebert says, other Arctic nations — including Greenland, Norway, the United States, and Canada — are interested in developing energy resources in the Arctic, setting “these states on a collision course with the international environmental community.”

Recent oil spills such as Deepwater Horizon have provided engineers and biologists with valuable insights into the containment, cleanup, and disposal of spilled oil.
These spills have also spurred the U.S. Department of Interior to enact some of the most aggressive reforms to offshore oil and gas regulation and oversight in U.S. history.

But as Deepwater Horizon demonstrated, it takes a tremendous amount of resources to clean up a major spill.
At the height of the cleanup, 7,000 vessels, 125 aircraft, and 47,000 people were deployed from a host of easily accessible ports and bases across the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
And yet, several months after the oil well was finally capped, more than 100 millions gallons of oil — out of as many as 210 million spilled — was still unaccounted for.
Much of that missing oil is believed to have settled on the sea floor.

A spill on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon isn't going to happen anytime soon in the Arctic.
But experts say that mobilizing even a fraction of these resources in the region in an expeditious manner would be extremely difficult because there are few roads, runways, or ports in the Arctic; little expert manpower standing by to stage a response; and insufficient international protocols to orchestrate a cleanup if the oil crosses international boundaries.
Tracking the oil by satellite would also be difficult because of weather conditions and ice that may cover oil slicks.

Studies have shown that in most cases, no more than 20 per cent of oil spilled in the ocean can be recovered by mechanical means — those that do not involve the use of chemicals, which can be toxic to marine organisms.
In situ burning and chemical dispersants, therefore, would have to be relied upon heavily in the event of a spill in the Arctic, experts say.

University of Manitoba scientist David Barber heads up a Canadian research group with expertise in the detection, impacts, and mitigation of oil in sea ice.
He says there is very limited knowledge of how Arctic marine ecosystems will be affected by the presence, composition, and dispersion of oil, as well as chemicals used for cleanup, such as dispersants.
“Development of technologies that would be able to help detect oil in ice, and cold-adapted bioremediation technologies, are in their infancy,” he points out.

Barber and his group recently received $28 million in funding from the Canadian government to study ways of detecting oil in Arctic ice.
He says there are a number of variables in the Arctic that complicate containment and clean up efforts, with ice and cold weather topping the list.
Oil can become frozen in ice and drift long distances, and oil trapped under ice also breaks down more slowly because of reduced wave action.
Lower evaporation losses in cold climes also slow the breakdown of oil.
The long-lingering effects of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in southern Alaska demonstrated the difficulties of cleaning up oil spills in cold climes.
What worries scientists and environmentalists even more is a blowout that might take place toward the end of the summer drilling season.

“If a blowout were to occur and could not be contained before the winter freeze-up, it could spew oil uncontrollably for the seven or eight months of winter ice-cover, without the possibility of taking any steps during that time to control it,” Crowley says.
“The oil would bind with the newly formed ice, be carried far and wide by ocean currents, and released into new environments the following spring.”
This, Barber said, should cause people “to pause and reflect on the consequences of allowing oil and gas development in this region without the proper safeguards.”

Environmental groups are particularly concerned that Shell is being given permits for conditional drilling in the Arctic, considering that the company’s history of exploratory drilling has been fraught with problems, including the grounding of a drilling rig off the Alaska coast in late 2012.

Shell has made improvements in source control capping and containment since 2012, but experts with WWF and the Pew Charitable Trusts believe that Shell’s spill response capabilities, and those of U.S. agencies, still do not come close to resembling what an expert committee for the U.S. National Research Council recommended in 2014.
The report highlighted serious shortcomings and featured a long list of recommendations.

“There is still no backstop — no national regulation to ensure operators are prepared for the harsh conditions and remote location of the Arctic region,” says Marilyn Heiman, director of Pew’s US Arctic Project.
“That’s why we are pushing for [the] Interior [Department] to finalize strong regulations that will apply to all future drilling in the Arctic.”
The fact that Russia is ramping up activity in the Arctic was one of the concerns of the National Research Council committee.
If a spill or an accident were to happen on the Russian side of the border, the committee pointed out, oil could easily migrate into Alaskan waters.
The committee called on the U.S. Coast Guard to expand its bilateral agreement with Russia to include Arctic spill scenarios.
Crowley says the same international dispersion of oil could happen if a spill were to occur in Canada’s Beaufort Sea, where Imperial Oil Canada, Exxon Mobil, and BP have jointly filed an application to drill at least one well nearly a mile deep.

Crowley says that the barge that ended up in Russia is an example of what WWF-Canada has highlighted in an oil spill modeling map of the Beaufort Sea.
The barge has followed roughly the same path along the Canadian, Alaskan, and Russian coasts as many of the 22 oil spill scenarios depicted on the WWF map.

“This also highlights the need for increased cooperation, both between industry and governments, and especially between the Arctic states who share these waters,” says Crowley.

Links :

• ADN : Arctic issue: The continental shelf -- geological, legal or geopolitical? / NOAA ships heading north to collect data for modern Arctic navigational charts