Avoiding rock bottom: How Landsat aids nautical charting

A recent NOAA nautical chart of the Beaufort Sea

(Chart 16081: Alaska-Arctic Coast, Scott Pt. to Tangent Pt. ).

The massive thumb-shaped shoal at the top left was identified by NOAA using Landsat satellite data.

From NASA  by Laura Rocchio

On the most recent nautical chart of the Beaufort Sea where the long narrow Tapkaluk Islands of Alaska’s North Slope separate the sea from the shallow Elson Lagoon (Nautical Chart 16081) a massive shoal is immediately noticeable just west of the entrance to the lagoon.
On the chart it looks like a massive blue thumb jutting out into the sea.
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) identified this prodigious, 6-nautical mile-long, 2-nm-wide shoal using Landsat satellite data.

It was sometime around 1950 that a hydrographic survey ship last plied these waters taking water depth measurements along its path using a single-beam echo sounder and visual navigation.
These data points were laboriously merged with shoreline and hazard information to create this chart, Alaska-Arctic Coast, Scott Pt. to Tangent Pt.
Given the low ship traffic in the region, updating this chart was lower priority than other high-traffic areas.
But things change—fishing and water-commuting traffic have risen in the area, as has marine tourism; but that’s not all: bottom depths have changed too as currents, erosion, and sediments have worked together to sculpt the seafloor.

In NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey, the Marine Chart Division is responsible for updating the suite of over 1000 nautical charts that keep mariners in U.S. waters safe.
Their mandate covers all U.S. territorial waters in the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), a combined area of 3.4 square nautical miles that extends 200 nautical miles offshore from the nation’s coastline.
The U.S. has the largest EEZ of all nations in the world, but it ranks behind 18 other nations in the number of vessels with hydrographic surveying capabilities.
Their job is sizable and expensive.
While the Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for maintaining shipping channel depths, providing bathymetry everywhere else in U.S. waters is NOAA’s duty.

Keeping waterways safe is a massive undertaking

The responsibilities of NOAA’s Marine Chart Division are immense.
Charged with providing accurate charts for mariners, NOAA cartographers need to know when existing charts are out-of-date.
To determine if charts are current, they employ lots of tools.
They monitor navigation hazard reports submitted by mariners; they watch ship traffic patterns using vessel positioning information (via the Automatic Identification System); and more-and-more they are turning to satellite information, especially Landsat data.

The field of Satellite Derived Bathymetry (SDB), has been around for nearly a half-century now, but the advent of free Landsat data in 2008 together with the 2013 launch of the more-advanced Landsat 8 satellite and a shift in thinking about SDB products, have led to a reinvigorated use of satellite data in NOAA’s Marine Chart Division.

The concept of SDB is that different wavelengths of light penetrate water to differing degrees.
The smaller the wavelengths (e.g. blue and green light) penetrate water more than longer-wavelengths (e.g. near infrared, shortwave infrared).
When water is clear and the seafloor bottom is bright (sandy for example) estimates of depth can be made by modeling the depth of light penetration based on the amount of reflectance measured by the satellite.
And when multiple visible-wavelength spectral bands are used together, the effects of seafloor reflectance variability and water turbidity are lessened.
These modeled depth measurements typically do not meet hydrographic accuracy standards, so in the past SDB measurements were eschewed.

“There’s been a shift in the way we think,” Lieutenant Anthony Klemm, a NOAA Corps Officer in the Office of Coast Survey’s Marine Chart Division, explains,
“In the past, if a measurement wasn’t made by the Army Corps or a NOAA survey ship, we didn’t want to use it, but now we are opening up to other technologies to evaluate the health of our current chart suite.”

Because of this sea change in thinking and faced with the daunting job of deciding which charts were most in need of updating, NOAA hydrographers revisited the use of SDB using freely available Landsat data as a viable tool to help them do their jobs.

“NOAA has now been using Landsat imagery for chart adequacy assessment and mission planning,” Shachak Pe’eri, a Research Professor at the Joint Hydrographic Center at the University of New Hampshire, says.

The Joint Hydrographic Center, a think-tank of researchers investigating technology and mapping challenges in NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey, realized that Landsat SDB could be an important reconnaissance tool.
A single Landsat image is about 100 nautical miles across and affords a wide overview of a coastal area.
Maps of SDB can be compared with existing nautical charts.
Places where depth patterns do not match are more closely examined.
Has the seafloor changed in this area?
If an area looks shallower than what is presented in the chart and if there is a reasonable amount of vessel traffic or corroborating mariners’ reports in the area, the chart location is tagged as a higher-priority candidate for hydrographic mapping—i.e. sending out a hydrographic ship to make depth measurements using sonar (multi-beam or single-beam).

Multi-beam sonar provides very accurate and comprehensive bathymetry, but for the amount of water NOAA is responsible for charting, these expensive ships are in short supply.

Klemm has been out on hydrographic voyages, and knows well the amount of time and effort that goes into gathering bathymetry information.
He is excited about the prospect of formally incorporating Landsat SDB into his workflow.

“SDB products to evaluate the current state of existing bathymetry representation is pretty amazing because of the temporal resolution of the satellite data—a little over every two weeks and you get a new shot of an area,” Klemm describes.
Landsat 8’s orbit puts it back over a given location every sixteen days.

Because satellites like Landsat can provide “quantifiable information related to the amount of change since the last hydrographic survey,” as Pe’eri wrote, SDB information can figure prominently into the determination of where new hydrographic surveys are most needed.

Pe’eri and Klemm have been working on a NOAA policy about the use of SDB. They are outlining how to use SDB to prioritize hydrographic surveys using a chart adequacy assessment procedure they have developed.
They are also working on a policy of how to update a chart with features found using satellite imagery.
“These charts are considered intermediary, but they can be made publicly available and used until a proper hydrographic survey can be performed,” Pe’eri explains.

Landsat is good at identifying new shoals, like that big 12 nm thumb-shaped shoal off of Alaska’s North Slope.
And NOAA thinking is that it is better to amend charts to tell mariners that satellites indicated a shoal, even though exact depths cannot be provided until the next hydrographic survey.

Deriving bathymetry with Landsat for 43 years

Uncharted shoals have sunk many ships. In the late 1960s, research groups began to experiment with remote bathymetry using multispectral airborne data in an effort to make measurements over large tracts of coastal waters in search of navigational hazards and shifting bathymetry.
With the launch of Landsat 1 in 1972, these newly developed methods could be used with data collected by the satellite’s Multispectral Scanner System and its wide 100 nm-wide images—satellite derived bathymetry was born.

In 1975, NASA teamed with famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau to conduct an ocean bathymetry experiment using Landsat data to measure water depth in the Bahamas and off of Florida’s eastern coast.
Cousteau’s ship, the Calypso, anchored over a study site as Landsats 1 and 2 collected data from overhead, while they simultaneously took depth measurements using the ship’s sonic depth finder.
In this pre-GPS timeframe, LORAN-C radio measurements were used for locating the boat position.
They also dove to the seafloor to take in situ reflectance measurements with a submarine photometer.
This early experiment proved the feasibility of mapping shoals in clear water to depths equal to or greater than those needed for safe shipping.

The International Hydrographic Office, an inter-government organization concerned with making the seas navigable, had once classified shoals as navigational hazards between 0 and 17 meters (56 feet) below the surface, but with the advent of supertankers with drafts of over 20 meters (65 feet) and the capacity to carry massive amounts of oil, shoal definitions had to be broadened.

A year later, a Landsat 2 image acquired on March 29, 1976 revealed a major uncharted 8-km long reef in the Indian Ocean’s Chagos Archipelago: “There was a major reef or bank where the chart showed safe, deep water and some banks appeared to be out of position by more than 15 km relative to the nearest land,” wrote James Hammack, a participant in the NASA/Cousteau experiment and a cartographer with the Defense Mapping Agency’s Hydrographic Center (now part of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency).

 Colvocoresses Reef in the GeoGarage platform (NGA chart #61610)

Within a few months, the newly found reef, named Colvocoresses Reef after the USGS cartographer who identified the feature on the Landsat image, was added to DMA nautical chart 61610.
In the interim, Notice to Mariners were sent out to warn sailors in the region.

Based on the success of the NASA/Cousteau and Chagos Archipelago experiments, DMA requested that Landsat data be collected globally over coastal areas.
This data was used to “augment the completeness” of it nautical chart products.
DMA also used Landsat data to visually verify ship-reported navigational hazards.

 Star Reefs Passage in the GeoGarage platform (AHS 519 chart)

Some other documented cases of Landsat data providing critical information to navigation include a safe deep passage through Papua New Guinea’s Star Reefs, which was first discovered using Landsat imagery.
The Australian Royal Navy ship Flinders confirmed this passageway, which enabled ships to more quickly travel from Australian ports to East Asian ones.

 Red Sea near Al Qunfidha (UKHO chart) with the GeoGarage platform

Likewise, British Admiralty Chart 322 of the Red Sea near Al Qunfidha had to be completely revised after it was compared with Landsat data.

In 2006, 75 shallow-water features such as reefs, shoals, and seamounts where discovered or found mislocated with the use of Landsat 7.

Landsat aids hydrographic offices around the world

The International Hydrographic Organization and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission jointly create an authoritative, publicly available, global bathymetry map known as the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, or GEBCO. GEBCO charts have been published since 1903.
Despite this heritage, only about a tenth of the ocean floor has been mapped.

Satellite Derived Bathymetry measurements overlaid on a chart of Plymouth Bay in Massachusetts. The red indicates shallow waters.

Here, the SDB indicates that the the shoaling of Brown’s Bank has shifted since the chart’s creation.

GEBCO is no stranger to SDB.
They have been aware of its capabilities for decades.
But now that Landsat data are publically and freely available it is getting more and more use—as no doubt the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2A, with spectral bands similar to Landsat 8, will as well.

The GEBCO companion how-to guide for creating bathymetric charts, called The GEBCO Cookbook, includes a chapter on using Landsat to derive bathymetry.
For cash-strapped national hydrographic offices, using free Landsat data to assess the adequacy of existing charts is essential, allowing them to allocate scarce resources with maximum impact to mariner safety.
SDB alone does not meet IHO accuracy standards, but its use as a complimentary prioritization and planning tool is key.

SDB measurements can also “be used to infill regions in remote or inaccessible areas where no (or poor) bathymetry data exists,” shares Stephen Sagar, an Aquatic Remote Sensing Scientist with Australia’s National Earth and Marine Observation Group.

NOAA, as a major Landsat user, has been sponsoring international GEBCO students from around the world (Kenya, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, Philippines, etc.) and teaching them how to use SDB to update charts in their home offices.
This summer from July 14–16, NOAA hosted a workshop to share this knowledge in the confidences that using SDB will make mariners worldwide more safe.
Hydrographers from 11 countries attended. The workshop was a big success and more workshops are planned for 2016.

NOAA: thinking big about SDB

Water clarity has been a limiting factor when it comes to SDB.
If waters are too turbid (full of sediments that obscure light reflectance from the seafloor), then bathymetric measurements cannot be made.

The inability of longer wavelengths, such as shortwave infrared light, to deeply penetrate water allows hydrographers to map shoreline change.
But when concentrations of suspended sediments are great enough to thwart penetration by shorter wavelengths, SDB by definition suffers.
But in NOAA’s Marine Chart Division, researchers are thinking outside of the SDB-box.

Pe’eri, in a collaborative study with NOAA and the U.S. Coast Guard, has pioneered turbidity mapping as a proxy for bathymetric measurements.
In enclosed waterbodies with strong currents, such as bays and sounds, turbid channels show up on Landsat imagery—and these turbid channels illuminate where currents are carving deeper channels that are safe for boat passage.

Landsat 8 image of In Bechevin Bay, the easternmost passageway between the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea.

This natural color, pan-sharpened image was acquired on May 14, 2014.

Image processing by Jesse Allen, NASA Earth Observatory

 Bechevin Bay with the GeoGarage platform

Back in the arctic, where near-shore changes occur rapidly because of seasonal sedimentation and erosion, new SDB techniques like turbidity mapping are preventing maritime mishaps.
In Bechevin Bay, where the easternmost passageway between the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea provides fisherman with a shortcut for three ice-free months a year, the location of sand bars can shift significantly because of melting ice in this narrow passage.
With the help of Landsat SDB turbidity maps, the new locations of these sandbars can be estimated. Recently this has led to the discovery of a new, straighter, and more geologically stable channel.

“SDB estimated from Landsat turbidity maps can help guide NOAA charting craft when they are mapping the channel each year and placing channel marking buoys.
This saves time and it makes the process safer,” Pe’eri says.
“With insufficient knowledge of sandbar locations, the NOAA craft risk running aground and crew can be thrown overboard when that happens.”

Pe’eri’s team has also developed a multi-image method to help separate clear and turbid waters using Landsat data.
Techniques such as turbidity mapping will grow increasingly important for navigation planning as warming waters enable more industrial development of the Arctic and set the stage for international shipping routes.

NOAA’s Marine Chart Division has made Landsat a prominent tool in their charting toolbox—especially Landsat 8 with its new deep blue band, improved signal-to-noise and greater dynamic range (12-bit).

“Landsat 8 is overwhelmingly better,” Pe’eri says citing the new satellite’s additional cirrus band which helps him better account for atmospheric noise that can counter accurate SDB and Landsat 8’s better radiometric resolution (which means more signal, less noise, and more measurement fidelity).
But it’s not just SDB that this innovative office is utilizing.
They are also watching traffic patterns using the Automatic Identification System (AIS) and even light communication from recreational boaters, fishermen, tugboats, and larger vessels, and together with bathymetry measurements are prioritizing which charts are in perilous need of revision.

“We’re making charts safer up there,” Klemm says talking about the recent Beaufort Sea chart revisions, “and that’s so exciting.”

Links :

• Hypack : Reconnaissance surveying of Bechevin Bay, AK using SDB (paper)

The ultra-rich dive into a new obsession

The Triton 3300/3 is one of the most popular submersible and it can take a pilot and two passengers.

From BBC by Eric Barton

Tucked away in an industrial park in Vero Beach, Florida, 34-year-old engineer John Ramsay is painstakingly drafting a design for a submarine that will be able to reach the five deepest points in the ocean.
The catch?
It's a personal vessel for a billionaire.
“It’s going to be a world- or certainly industry-changing vehicle,” Ramsay said.
The $25m, two-man submarine will take six months to design and another two years to build by Triton Submarines.
“Nobody has built a deep-going [personal] vehicle that has been used again and again, but that’s what we are trying to do.”
His client is one of several who see the ocean depths as a new playground.
A new breed of billionaires is tapping into their inner Jacques Cousteau — the famous undersea explorer — and they're willing to pay big.
With pricetags starting at a $3m, and requiring a yacht to park on, these personal submarines are not only for adventure, but also for their owners to help advance research and exploration in ways that weren’t dreamed about a decade ago.
“Part of this trend is that it is cool to have a submarine and part of it is that a private person can support research with it,” said Charles Kohnen, owner of submarine builder SEAmagine Hydrospace Corp in California.
“This is not just an effort to go where no man has gone before. This is going where no man has gone before — and come back to tell about it.”



The way forward

Still nascent, the personal submarine industry comprises four companies that account for just 20 to 30 privately owned and manned subs across the globe, according to Kohnen, an early pioneer who sold his first sub in 2000.
These sub owners frequently offer charters, at a price often up to $30,000 a day.
Some of these vessels have been rented out by other billionaires looking for a new holiday adventure, while others have been lent to research groups to discover new sea life or explore shipwrecks.
Few research organizations can, after all, afford to buy a submarine, let alone pay for upkeep and maintenance or cover the cost of the expensive ship that's required to transport it out to sea.
So, teaming up with a private owner has proven to be one promising strategy.

In 2013, researchers traveling in a privately owned submarine off the coast of Japan filmed a giant squid in its natural habitat for the first time.
And, in March of this year, a team using submarines owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen found the Japanese battleship Musashi, which had been sunk off the coast of the Philippines in World War II.
Sometimes, however, the thrill of discovery lies purely with the submarine owner.
In 2012, filmmaker James Cameron broke a record for the deepest solo dive when he used a sub he owned to explore the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot in the oceans, located in the western Pacific. Cameron’s vehicle wasn’t designed for multiple trips into the extreme pressure of deep water and was retired after its only trip.

Beautiful underwater footage filmed in February 2015 using a small personal submarine from SEAmagine

The diving took place at Cocos Island in Costa Rica in conjunction with Misión Tiburón an organization that promotes the conservation of sharks and other marine species.

The video shows the abundance of sea life at Cocos’ marine sanctuary from the shallow depths to the very deep unexplored regions where a rare Prickly Shark was found during this expedition at a depth of 340m (1115 ft).

Most private subs reach depths of 1,000m or less.
The biggest construction challenge remains the compartment that holds passengers, which become compromised when under pressure at depth.
Triton’s subs include a 6.5-inch-thick acrylic passenger bubble made in Germany at a cost of about $1m.
To go deeper, the sub must be far more durable, including a sphere of ultra-thick glass that could cost four or five times as much, Ramsay said.
Just how effective these private owners can be at research or exploration is unclear, said George Bass, professor emeritus at the Texas A&M University Nautical Archaeology Program.
Bass is one of the world’s most prolific hunters of shipwrecks, especially in the Mediterranean.
Using a SEAmagine submarine off the coast of Turkey, he once found 14 wrecks in a month.
But Bass doubts that private owners could have the same kind of luck.
“It’s possible [that private sub owners] could stumble on a shipwreck or a new discovery,” Bass said.
“But it takes a lot of research and knowledge to make that happen.”

 Crystal Cruises has announced plans for an "extravagantly appointed yacht" featuring submarines offering underwater weddings (source : The Telegraph)

In the name of science

In Costa Rica, a submarine named DeepSee is being used by adventure travellers, researchers, and scientists for dives predominantly around Cocos Island, about 350 miles off the mainland.
With its unique cross currents, the water surrounding the islands is rich with rare coral and marine life, from crustaceans to whale sharks.
DeepSee’s owner, an eponymous private company, allows researchers from the University of Costa Rica to take the sub down for free, said operations manager Shmulik Blum, and they sometimes find new sea life never seen before.

 This video is about a dive with the DeepSea Submarine to 300+ m depth at Cocos Island, Costa Rica

Two years ago, the Costa Rican researchers discovered an entire new family of coral, the kind of discovery that hadn’t been made in 40 years, Blum said.
The new, soft coral is in waters so deep that it never sees light and lacks any pigment.
Using DeepSee’s robotic arm, researchers scooped up a sample that they later analysed in the lab.
“Usually, the lack of access to waters this deep limits the ability to learn about it,” Blum said.
“Once we can get down there, it gives us access to an entirely new world.”



Blum was speaking by phone from DeepSee’s office in the small port of Puntarenas.
Hours later, he and his submersible team would be making the day and a half journey to the Cocos Island for a new set of dives.
“Maybe we’ll find something new this time too,” he said.
“You never know."

Links :

• YouTube : Ultra-Luxury Private Submarine Comes With a Pool 
• GizMag : DeepFlight Dragon set to usher in the era of the personal submarine

The essence of surfing

Dreams, freedom, passion. But also fear and boundaries to break.

This is the essence of surfing.

Image of the week : comparing two 'Blue Marble' photos of Earth

From NYTimes

On Tuesday we shared NASA's new photo of a fully illuminated Earth.
(see : NASA website : 1972 / 2015 )
This is an update to the “Blue Marble” photo taken by Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972, more than four decades ago.

Here, you can compare the two.

“How perfect North America looks. I am still amazed by how the oceans dwarf the continents,” Jim Corradino of Norwalk, Conn., wrote us.

“There’s something remarkable about a single snapshot of the Earth — an intact view of our planet in its entirety, hanging in space,” the astronaut Scott Kelly observed in an essay on Medium.
He explained what makes these images so special.
Along with the challenge of getting far enough away to get the entire Earth into a single frame, there is the matter of lighting.

“In order to view the Earth as a fully illuminated globe, a person (or camera) must be situated in front of it, with the sun directly at his or her back,” he wrote.
“Not surprisingly, it can be difficult to arrange this specific lighting scheme for a camera-set up that’s orbiting in space at speeds approaching thousands of miles per hour.”

Consequently many of the images of Earth we see are actually composites.
This is just the first in a series of images of Earth that will be sent back from a million miles away.
We will soon see the other side, fully illuminated as well.

Links :

• National Geographic : NASA’s ‘Blue Marbles’: Pictures of Earth From 1972 to Today

Inside the secret world of Russia's cold war mapmakers

What is just as amazing as the number of maps churned out by the Soviet military is the fact that none of these maps are copyrighted since the Soviet Union was not a signatory to the Berne Convention on copyright.

From Wired by Greg Miller

A MILITARY HELICOPTER was on the ground when Russell Guy arrived at the helipad near Tallinn, Estonia, with a briefcase filled with $250,000 in cash.
The place made him uncomfortable.
It didn’t look like a military base, not exactly, but there were men who looked like soldiers standing around.
With guns.

The year was 1989.
The Soviet Union was falling apart, and some of its military officers were busy selling off the pieces. By the time Guy arrived at the helipad, most of the goods had already been off-loaded from the chopper and spirited away.
The crates he’d come for were all that was left.
As he pried the lid off one to inspect the goods, he got a powerful whiff of pine.
It was a box inside a box, and the space in between was packed with juniper needles.
Guy figured the guys who packed it were used to handling cargo that had to get past drug-sniffing dogs, but it wasn’t drugs he was there for.

 San Francisco extract

Inside the crates were maps, thousands of them.
In the top right corner of each one, printed in red, was the Russian word секрет.

Secret.

 Yemen Topographic Map 1:200,000 Russian Soviet Military

The maps were part of one of the most ambitious cartographic enterprises ever undertaken.

During the Cold War, the Soviet military mapped the entire world, parts of it down to the level of individual buildings.
The Soviet maps of US and European cities have details that aren’t on domestic maps made around the same time, things like the precise width of roads, the load-bearing capacity of bridges, and the types of factories.
They’re the kinds of things that would come in handy if you’re planning a tank invasion.
Or an occupation.
Things that would be virtually impossible to find out without eyes on the ground.

Given the technology of the time, the Soviet maps are incredibly accurate.
Even today, the US State Department uses them (among other sources) to place international boundary lines on official government maps.

Guy’s company, Omnimap, was one of the first to import Soviet military maps to the West.
But he wasn’t alone.
Like the military officials charged with guarding the maps, map dealers around the world saw an opportunity.
Maps that were once so secret that an officer who lost one could be sent to prison (or worse) were bought by the ton and resold for a profit to governments, telecommunications companies, and others.

“I’m guessing we bought a million sheets,” Guy says.
“Maybe more.”

University libraries at places like Stanford, Oxford, and the University of Texas in Austin have drawers stuffed with Cold War Soviet maps, acquired from Guy and other dealers, but the maps have languished in obscurity.
Very few academics have seen them, let alone studied them.
Whatever stories they have to tell are hidden in plain sight.

But one unlikely scholar, a retired British software developer named John Davies, has been working to change that.
For the past 10 years he’s been investigating the Soviet maps, especially the ones of British and American cities.
He’s had some help, from a military map librarian, a retired surgeon, and a young geographer, all of whom discovered the maps independently.
They’ve been trying to piece together how they were made and how, exactly, they were intended to be used.
The maps are still a taboo topic in Russia today, so it’s impossible to know for sure, but what they’re finding suggests that the Soviet military maps were far more than an invasion plan.
Rather, they were a framework for organizing much of what the Soviets knew about the world, almost like a mashup of Google Maps and Wikipedia, built from paper.

A 1980 Soviet map of San Francisco, California. 

East View Geospatial

DAVIES HAS PROBABLY spent more time studying the Soviet maps than anyone else.

An energetic widower in his early 70s, he has hundreds of paper maps and thousands of digital copies at his house in northeast London, and he maintains a comprehensive website about them.

“I was one of those kids who at 4 is drawing maps of the house and garden,” he told me when we spoke for the first time, last year.

“Anywhere I go I just hoover up all the maps I can find.”

It was on a consulting trip to Latvia in the early 2000s that he stumbled on a trove of Soviet maps in a shop near the center of the capital city, Riga.

Davies struck up a friendship with one of the owners, a tall, athletic man named Aivars Beldavs, and bought an armload of Soviet maps from him every time he was in town.

Back home he’d compare the Soviet maps to the maps made around the same time by the Ordnance Survey, the national mapping agency, and other British government sources.

He soon spotted some intriguing discrepancies.

In Chatham, a river town in the far southeast, a Soviet map from 1984 showed the dockyards where the Royal Navy built submarines during the Cold War—a region occupied by blank space on contemporary British maps.

The Soviet map of Chatham also includes the dimensions, carrying capacity, clearance, and even the construction materials of bridges over the River Medway.

In Cambridge, Soviet maps from the ’80s include a scientific research center that didn’t appear on Ordnance Survey maps till years later.

Davies started compiling lists of these differences, and on his trips to Latvia, he started asking Beldavs more questions.

Beldavs, it turns out, had served in the Soviet Army in the mid-’80s, and he used the secret military maps in training exercises in East Germany.

A signature was required before a map could be checked out for an exercise, and the army made sure every last one got returned.

“Even if it gets destroyed, you need to bring back the pieces,” Beldavs says.

A few years after he got out of the army, Beldavs helped start the map shop, Jana Seta, which sold maps mainly to tourists and hikers.

As he tells it, officers at the military cartographic factories in Latvia were instructed to destroy or recycle all the maps as the Soviet Union dissolved in the early ’90s.

“But some clever officers found our company,” he says.

An offer was made, a deal was struck, and Beldavs estimates the shop acquired enough maps to fill 13 rail cars.

At first they didn’t have enough space to store them all.

One time, some local kids tried to set fire to a pallet load of maps they’d left outside.

But the vast majority of them survived unscathed.

Soviet maps stacked up in Aivars Beldavs’ map shop in Latvia.

Aivars Beldavs/Jana Seta map shop

“These maps were very interesting for the local people,” Beldavs says.

“We suddenly had very detailed maps like nothing we had before.”

Indeed, not all maps were created equal in the USSR. While the military maps were extremely accurate, the maps available to ordinary citizens were next to useless.

In a remarkable 2002 paper in a cartographic journal, the eminent Russian cartographer and historian of science, Alexey Postnikov, explains why this was so.

“Large-scale maps for ordinary consumers had to be compiled using the 1:2,500,000 map of the Soviet Union, with the relevant parts enlarged to the needed scale,” he wrote.

That’s like taking a road map of Texas and using a photocopier to enlarge the region around Dallas.

You can blow it up all you want, but the street-level details you need to find your way around the city will never be there.

Worse, the maps for the masses were deliberately distorted with a special projection that introduced random variations.

“The main goal was to crush the contents of maps so it would be impossible to recreate the real geography of a place from the map,” Postnikov tells me.

Well-known landmarks like rivers and towns were depicted, but the coordinates, directions, and distances were all off, making them useless for navigation or military planning, should they fall into enemy hands.

The cartographer who devised this devious scheme was awarded the State Prize by Stalin.

While the newly available Soviet military maps had practical value for people inside the former republics, for Davies they brought back a bit of Cold War chill.

Anyone old enough to have lived through those paranoid days of mutually assured destruction will find it a bit disturbing to see familiar hometown streets and landmarks labeled in Cyrillic script.

The maps are a rare glimpse into the military machine on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

Sri Lanka Topographic Map 1:200,000 Russian Soviet Military

The Soviet maps were just a casual hobby for Davies until he met David Watt, a map librarian for the British Ministry of Defence, in 2004.

Watt, it turns out, had encountered Beldavs years earlier and done some investigations of his own.

At a cartography conference in Cologne, Germany, in 1993, Watt had picked up a pamphlet from Beldavs’ shop advertising Soviet military topographic maps and city plans.

He was stunned.

“If they really were Soviet military city plans, then these were items which four years before were so highly classified that even squaddies in the Red Army were not allowed to see them,” he later recalled.

Watt placed an order.

A few weeks later a package was waiting for him at the airport. Inside were the maps he’d ordered—and a bunch more Beldavs had thrown in.

Over the next few years, Watt pored over these maps and picked up others from various dealers.

The scope of the Soviet military’s cartographic mission began to dawn on him.

They had mapped nearly the entire world at three scales.

The most detailed of these three sets of maps, at a scale of 1:200,000, consisted of regional maps.

A single sheet might cover the New York metropolitan area, for example.

But they didn’t stop there.

The Soviets made far more detailed maps of some parts of the world.

They mapped all of Europe, nearly all of Asia, as well as large parts of North America and northern Africa at 1:100,000 and 1:50,000 scales, which show even more features and fine-grained topography.

Another series of still more zoomed-in maps, at 1:25,000 scale, covers all of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as hundreds or perhaps thousands of foreign cities.

At this scale, city streets and individual buildings are visible.

And even that wasn’t the end of it.

The Soviets produced hundreds of remarkably detailed 1:10,000 maps of foreign cities, mostly in Europe, and they may have mapped the entire USSR at this scale, which Watt estimated would take 440,000 sheets.

All in all, Watt estimated that the Soviet military produced more than 1.1 million different maps.

A 1980 Soviet map of San Diego naval facilities (left) compared with a US Geological Survey map of the same area, from 1978 (revised from 1967). 

East View Geospatial/USGS

In 2004 he presented some of his research at a meeting of the Charles Close Society, a group devoted to the study of Ordnance Survey maps.

Davies was in the audience.

The two men spoke, and Watt encouraged Davies to study them more seriously.

Around the same time, Watt and Davies met two other men who’d also become intrigued by the Soviet maps: John Cruickshank, a retired surgeon from Leeds, and Alex Kent, a geography graduate student at Canterbury Christ Church University.

“It really all snowballed from there,” Watt says.

“The four of us got together as a kind of private study group.”

For Davies, the new friends and their shared interest came as a welcome distraction in an emotionally difficult time: His wife of nearly four decades was dying of cancer.

In 2006, Davies organized a research trip to Latvia.

The group spent several days in Riga, poring over Soviet military maps at Beldavs’ shop and visiting a cartographic factory that had made civilian maps during the Soviet era.

Not that the trip was all work—it coincided with the Latvian midsummer festival, an all-night affair involving folk songs and dancing, fueled by copious helpings of beer and wild boar sausage.

“It was an absolute hoot,” Watt recalls.

 Soviet map of Staten Island and, in the upper right, Lower Manhattan, from 1982.

The details include dimensions and building materials of the bridges.

East View Geospatial

IT’S EASY NOW, in an age when anybody can whip out a smartphone and call up a street map or high-res satellite image of any point on Earth with a few taps, to forget how hard it once was to come by geospatial knowledge.

In post-war Russia, men died in the pursuit of better maps.

After World War II, Stalin ordered a complete survey of the Soviet Union.

Though aerial photography had reduced the need for fieldwork by then, it didn’t eliminate it entirely, according to the 2002 paper by Alexey Postnikov, the Russian cartographer.

Survey teams endured brutal conditions as they traversed Siberian wilderness and rugged mountains to establish networks of control points.

A surveyor himself, Postnikov writes that on a survey expedition to remote southern Yakutiya in the 1960s he found a grim note scrawled on a tree trunk by one of his predecessors.

It’s dated November 20, 1948. “All my reindeer have perished,” it begins.

“The food stores became bears’ prey. I am left with a very sick junior surveyor on my hands. I have no transportation or means of subsistence.”

The stranded surveyor says he will attempt to force his way to the River Gynym, a sparsely populated area at least 200 kilometers away.

Given that temperatures in Yakutiya rarely rise above –4 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, Postnikov doubts they made it.

It was after the death of Stalin in 1953 that the Soviet military, which had to that point focused its cartographic efforts on Soviet territory and nearby regions like the Balkans and Eastern Europe, started to take on global ambitions.

Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, saw fertile ground for the spread of communism in a world in which former European colonies were quickly gaining their independence, says Nick Baron, a historian at the University of Nottingham.

“Khrushchev was exhilarated by the prospect of winning over these newly liberated countries in Africa, South Asia, and so on,” Baron says.

“It was around that time that the military first began to undertake foreign mapping, including sending their own cartographers abroad to conduct their own surveys in many of these developing countries.”

A detail of a 1975 map showing the Pentagon.

Postnikov estimates that the military mapping program involved tens of thousands of surveyors and topographers, the people who go out into the field and gather data on relief and other features, and hundreds of cartographers who compiled these data to make the maps.

During the Cold War he served in a parallel civilian cartographic corps that made maps for engineers and planners.

These maps were far better than the bogus ones produced for the proletariat, accurate enough to be used for building roads and other infrastructure, but stripped of any strategic details that could aid the enemy if they were captured.

The civilian cartographers were well aware that the military was busily mapping foreign territories, Postnikov says.

“We knew each other personally, and we knew about their main task.”

How many maps did the military cartographers make?

“Millions and millions,” is what Postnikov says when I ask, but he quickly adds: “It’s absolutely impossible to say, for me, at least.”

The US military made maps during the Cold War too, of course, but the two superpowers had different mapping strategies that reflected their different military strengths, says Geoff Forbes, who served in the US Army as a Russian voice interceptor during the Cold War and is now director of mapping at Land Info, a Colorado company that stocks Soviet military maps.

“The US military’s air superiority made mapping at medium scales adequate for most areas of the globe,” Forbes says.

As a result, he says, the US military rarely made maps more detailed than 1:250,000, and generally only did so for areas of special strategic interest. 

“The Soviets, on the other hand, were the global leaders in tank technology,” Forbes says.

After suffering horrific losses during the Nazi ground invasion in WWII, the Soviets had built up the world’s most powerful army.

Maneuvering that army required large-scale maps, and lots of them, to cover smaller areas in more detail.

“One to 50,000 scale is globally considered among the military to be the tactical scale for ground forces,” Forbes says.

“These maps were created so that if and when the Soviet military was on the ground in any given place, they would have the info they needed to get from point A to point B.”

 Cannes-Antibes (France)

A manual produced by the Russian Army, translated and published in 2005 by East View, a Minnesota company with a large inventory of Soviet maps, gives some insight into how the topographic maps could be used in planning or executing combat operations.

It includes tables on the range of audibility of various sounds (a snapping twig can be heard up to 80 meters away; troop movements on foot, up to 300 meters on a dirt road or 600 meters on a highway; an idling tank, up to 1,000 meters; a rifle shot, up to 4,000 meters).

Other tables give the distances for visual objects (a lit cigarette can be visible up to 8,000 meters away at night, but you’d have to get within 100 meters to make out details of a soldier’s weaponry in daylight).

Still more tables estimate the speed at which troops can move depending on the slope of the terrain, the width and condition of the roadway, and whether they are on foot, in trucks, or in tanks.

The maps themselves include copious text with detailed descriptions of the area they depict, everything from the materials and conditions of the roads to the diameter and spacing of the trees in a forest to the typical weather at different times of year.

The map for Altan Emel, a remote region of China near the border of Mongolia and Russia, includes these details, according to a translation on Omnimap’s website:

The lakes are usually not large; 0.5-2 km2 (maximum up to 7 km2), with the depth up to 1 meter. The banks are low, gentle, and partially swamped. The bottom is slimy and vicious [sic]. Some of lakes have salted or alkaline water.

It goes on (and on) from there.

The description of San Diego, translated and published in English here for the first time, points out objects of obvious strategic interest—including a submarine base, a naval airbase, ammunition depots, factories that make aircraft and weapons—but also includes notes on public transportation, communications systems, and the height and architecture of buildings in various parts of town.

To make these maps of foreign territory, the Soviets started with official, publicly available maps from sources like the Ordnance Survey or the US Geological Survey.

John Davies has found, for example, that elevation markers on maps of Britain often appear at exactly the same points and work out to be exact metric equivalents of the British units.

(Because of such similarities, the Ordnance Survey has long maintained that the Soviet maps violate their copyright.)

The Soviets appear to have done the same thing with maps made by the US Geological Survey, but those maps are in the public domain, and anyone—including someone from the Soviet embassy—could have bought them easily.

“When I joined the USGS in 1976, I heard the then commonly-told story about a representative from the Soviet embassy in Washington obtaining the initial copy of the paper-print National Atlas, prepared by the USGS in cooperation with a number of other agencies, when it was offered for public sale in 1970,” USGS geologist and historian Clifford Nelson told me in an email.

Nelson added that it seems logical that Soviet representatives would have acquired 1:24,000-scale topographic maps from the US as they were printed, but he says he knows of no paper trail that could confirm that.

Despite the Ordnance Survey’s copyright claim, Davies argues that the Soviet maps aren’t mere copies.

In many places, they show new construction—roads, bridges, housing developments, and other features that don’t appear on contemporary Ordnance Survey maps.

Many of these details, Davies argues, came from aerial or satellite reconnaissance (the first Soviet spy satellite, Zenit, was launched into orbit in 1962).

Other details, such as notes on the construction materials and conditions of roadways and bridges, seemingly had to come from agents on the ground (or, according to one account from a Swedish counterintelligence officer, by picnicking Soviet diplomats with a preference for sites near objects of strategic interest).

Unlike the 1984 US Geological Survey map of Chicago’s lakefront, the 1982 Soviet map shows individual buildings in the city and structures on Navy Pier.

East View Geospatial/USGS

 Not that the Soviet maps are infallible.

There are curious mistakes here and there: Earthworks for a new pipeline in Teesside in the UK are mistaken for a road under construction, a nonexistent subway line connects the Angel and Barbican stations in London.

The town of Alexandria appears (correctly) in northern Virginia, but a town of the same name also appears (incorrectly) outside of Baltimore.

Defunct railways and ferry routes persist on editions of the Soviet maps for years after they’ve been discontinued.

There are other puzzles too.

The Soviets mapped a handful of American cities at a scale of 1:10,000. These are detailed street-level maps, but they don’t focus on places of obvious strategic importance.

The list of known maps at this scale includes:

Pontiac, MI
Galveston, TX
Bristol, PA
Scranton, PA
Syracuse, NY
Towanda, and North Towanda, NY
Watertown, NY
Niagara Falls, NY

Economic rather than military objectives may have motivated the Soviets to map these cities in detail, suggests Steven Seegel, an expert on Russian political and intellectual history at the University of Northern Colorado.

The Soviets admired US postwar economic prosperity and wanted to understand how it worked, Seegel says.

“These cities might have been on their radar for their reputation for heavy industry, shipping, or logistics,” Seegel says.

Pontiac had a General Motors plant, for instance, and Galveston was a major port. Scranton had a huge coal mine.

Other towns were close to hydropower plants.

“There was an obsession in the Soviet era over power grids and infrastructure” that went beyond their military implications, Seegel says.

John Davies has found scores of features on the Soviet maps that don’t seem to have immediate military relevance, things like factories, police stations, and transportation hubs.

“If it’s an invasion map, you wouldn’t show the bus stations,” Davies says.

“It’s a map for when you’re in charge.”

That’s probably true, but there may be even more to it than that, says Alex Kent, who’s now a senior lecturer in geography at Canterbury Christ Church University.

Kent thinks the Soviets used the maps more broadly. “It’s almost like a repository of intelligence, a database where you can put everything you know about a place in the days before computers,” he says.

“They managed to turn so much information into something that’s so clear and well-presented,” Kent says.

“There are layers of visual hierarchy. What is important stands out. What isn’t recedes. There’s a lot that modern cartographers could learn from the way these maps were made.”

A close-up of part of the Soviet map of New York City from 1982, with Lower Manhattan in the upper right corner. The details include dimensions and building materials of the bridges

Aesthetically, the maps are striking, if not beautiful.

The cartographers who made them took tremendous pride in their work, down to the last details, says Kent Lee, the CEO of EastView Geospatial, a Minnesota company that was once Russell Guy’s main competition in the Soviet map import business and now claims to have the largest collection of Soviet military maps outside of Russia.

“Cartographic culture is to Russia as wine culture is to France,” Lee says.

RUSSELL GUY DOESN’T sell many Soviet maps these days.

But for a while there in the ’90s, he says, business was booming.

Telecommunications companies bought them up as they were building cell phone networks across Africa or Asia.

If you’re building cell phone towers, Guy explains, you need to know the terrain, and the Soviet topographic maps were often the best source available in less developed parts of the world.

He says he could tell which countries were soliciting bids at any given time because as soon as one company ordered a set of Soviet topo maps, three or four others would call up to order the same thing.

 Alexandria

The US government was another big buyer.

Intelligence analysts used the Soviet maps in Afghanistan in the early 2000s, says Ray Milefsky, a former geographer and geospatial analyst at the US military’s Defense Mapping Agency (now called the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency).

Milefsky later moved to the State Department, where he specialized in determining where international boundaries should be drawn on official government maps.

The Soviet maps were—and continue to be—one of the best sources, says Milefsky, who retired in 2013.

The boundary lines on the Soviet maps are so accurate because the cartographers went back to the original treaties and reconciled the landmarks mentioned there with survey reports and boundary markers on the ground.

“When we first got them it was a gold mine, especially for aligning the boundaries of the former Soviet republics,” Milefsky says.

But with the proliferation of satellite mapping in recent years, the Soviet maps aren’t selling like they used to, Guy and other dealers say.

Once in a while a telecom or avionics company will order a set.

Sometimes an adventure travel company will buy a few.

Geologists and other academics sometimes use them.

A team of archaeologists recently used the Soviet maps to study the destruction of prehistoric earthen mounds by encroaching agriculture in Central Asia.

Even so, military maps are still a touchy topic in Russia.

As recently as 2012, a former military topographic officer was sentenced to 12 years in prison for allegedly leaking classified maps to the West.

John Davies and Alex Kent gave a presentation of their research at an international cartography meeting in Moscow in 2011, hoping to meet Russian cartographers or scholars who knew about the maps or perhaps had even worked on them.

They thought maybe someone might come up after their talk or approach them at happy hour.

No one did.

North of Crete (1:50,000)

“The silence was quite disconcerting,” Kent says.

“This was a subject you just don’t talk about.”

Davies and Kent have written a book about the Soviet military maps, but their publisher, the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, recently backed out, citing copyright concerns, Davies says.

For Guy, the maps are a reminder of a time when a map dealer from a small company in North Carolina got a tiny taste of the 007 lifestyle.

He and other dealers who brought the maps to the West still have vivid memories of clandestine meetings in dark Moscow bars, being trailed by KGB agents (who else could it be?), and worrying about who was listening in on their phone calls.

They still dodge questions about their old military connections.

They don’t want to stir up trouble.

Even now, the paranoia is hard to shake.

Links :

• Petro Vlasenko maps
• NYTimes (1988) : Soviet aide admits maps were faked for 50 years /  In the West, Map Makers hail shift in Soviet stance
• GeoGarage blog : Secretly mapping the seafloor / Red October for real: maps suggest Soviet subs cruised Canadian Arctic /  
• AtloGIS Geoinformatics Androïd app
• NOAA : Russian marine expeditionary investigations of the world ocean
• Wikipedia : Cartographic propaganda 
• Standford Univ. Library /