One of the first examples of a local nautical map from Hispanic America

Image of the map of Tlacotalpa
Relación Geográfica map of Tlacotalpa. Francisco Gali, 1580.
Source: Royal Academy of History, Madrid 

From Eurekalert

It is the map of Tlacotalpa by the Sevillian navigator Francisco Gali, which was made in 1580 at the request of the Spanish crown

In the last third of the 16th century, the Spanish crown set in motion a project to obtain a complete map of the New World.
The method thought up for this was to use surveys, known as Relaciones Geográficas.
A questionnaire with more than 50 questions was sent to each settlement.
These also had to be completed with a map of the local region.
These maps, known as pinturas (paintings), mainly lacked ground measurements and therefore scale, as well as geographical coordinates.
Only a few were done following the norms of European mapmaking.
Among these, some of the most important are the maps created by the Sevillian Francisco Gali, navigator, explorer, cosmographer and cartographer.

 Dibujo de la costa del golfo de México desde la península de Florida hasta Nombre de Dios

(Sketch of the coast of the Gulf of Mexico from the Florida peninsula to Nombre de Dios), 1519.
Source: Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla

In this context, Manuel Morato, researcher from the Higher Technical School of Engineering (ETSI) of the University of Seville, has published a scientific article on the map of Tlacotalpa, one of the first examples of local nautical cartography in Hispanic America, which Francisco Gali did on behalf of some mayors who had to complete the Relaciones questionnaire, as ordered by Philip II.

Location of the area depicted on the Gali’s map in current satellite image. 

hey have located Coatzacoalcos and Tehuantepec, where Gali also made a map for the Relaciones Geográficas.

Image prepared by the author

 

Tlacotalpa, today Tlacotalpán, is a small river village in the southeast of the state of Veracruz, within the limits of the Papaloapan region, in Mexico.
"These local civil servants, instead of getting a local artist to draw the maps, made the most of the fact that Gali, a sailor with knowledge of cartography, was travelling through the area towards the Pacific coast in an attempt, on the orders of the King, to find a route to the Philippines from the west coast of Mexico", explains Morato.

Relación Geográfica map of Tlacotalpa.

Redrawn version. Detail.

Identification numbers are shown

Gali’s map versus current satellite image.

Details.

It is a hand-drawn nautical chart from February 1580, done with great exactness for the standards of the time.
It shows in great detail the coast, the estuaries, bays, capes, lagoons and rivers, and in some areas indicates the depth of the water.
Both the chart and the text of the Relación are kept in the Royal Academy of History in Madrid. According to the text of the Relación, in the local tongue náhuatl-Tlacotalpa means divided land, which refers to the fact that the village was founded in the Pre-Hispanic era on an island in the river Papaloapan, as is represented on the map.

 Control points and segments to compare distances and calculate errors

 Distortion grid and displacement vectors on Gali’s map.

Eight control points have been used, corresponding to places whose latitudes are listed in map legend. (image with 18 points)

Each mesh corresponds to a surface of 5000 by 5000 m in the new reference map.

Produced by MapAnalyst

 Gali’s map versus current satellite image.

Based on the displacement vectors calculate by MapAnalyst.

Image prepared by the author

 NGA nautical raster chart overlayed on Google Maps imagery

in the GeoGarage platform

"The Gali map has been compared with current satellite photographs and the images are practically the same, apart from the distances of the time and the growth of the populated areas, like the city port of Veracruz and its surroundings", adds the researcher.
So, the planimetric deformation of the map, compared with a current one, could be due to the fact that, the article postulates, that Gali did not take sufficient measurements or that he did so but too quickly, as he was only passing through the area.
North American experts like Barbara Mundy suggest that these deformations could be due to Gali having used an existing padrón (a master map that was updated as new lands were discovered), which already included these deformations, leaving the author of the map only having to complete the information by adding places and detailing geographical features.
Manuel Morato maintains that this hypothesis is quite unlikely due to the secret nature of the Padrón Real, which was jealously guarded in the Casa de la Contratación in Seville and of which obsolete copies were destroyed so that they did not fall into the hands of foreign powers.
Other causes could have been motivated by the lack of in situ measurements and by the impossibility to determine geographical length in the 16th century.

Francisco Gali is known worldwide for his Trans-Pacific voyages, but little or nothing is known about him before his appearance in America.
He discovered the Acapulco route to Manila in 1583 and, according to the data kept in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville.
He explored the islands of the archipelago of Hawaii, the coast of California and San Francisco Bay, which he was the first explorer to see, though he did not cross it, for which reason its discovery has historically been attributed to Gaspar de Pórtola in 1769 and to Juan de Ayala, who was the first to cross the bay in his schooner on the 5th of August 1775.

In 1585, this Sevillian navigator wrote the book, 'Voyage, discoveries and observations from Acapulco to the Philippines, from the Philippines to Macao and from Macao to Acapulco'.
The manuscript was sent to the Viceroy of Mexico, but for unknown reasons, ended up in the hands of the Dutchman Jan Huygen van Linschoten (1563-1611), who published it in Dutch as 'Defeat of the Indies' (Amsterdam, 1596, 1614, 1626).
It was also translated into English (London, 1598), to German in the same year, into Latin (The Hague, 1599) and into French (Amsterdam, 1610, 1619 y 1638).
It was, however, never published in Spanish.
In addition, the whereabouts of Gali's original remain unknown, another of the mysteries that surround the life of this man.

Early colonial era map showing Tlacotalpan as an island

at the Salvador Ferrando Museum

Gali worked as a cartographer on three Relaciones Geográficas:
Tlacotalpa (February 1580), Coatzacoalcos (April 1580) and Tehuantepec (September-October 1580).
The first two maps are signed by their author, while the Tehuantepec map is anonymous, "although it has an unmistakable similarity to the other two maps by Gali.
However, this map is not given much credit as it is incomplete, it is clear that it wasn't made using the same measuring techniques as Gali used on his other two Gulf maps", explains Manuel Morato.

Morato, together with experts from the School of Hispanic American Studies (EEHA) at CSIC (Council of Scientific Research), has been working on the study of the representation of the territory from a historical perspective since 2010, using 16th-century maps, especially those related to the discovery and colonisation of the Americas.
To help with this project, he has had the help of Carmen Maso, head of cartography and graphic arts at the Library of the Royal Academy of History in Madrid, and of Michael Hironymous, head of rare books and manuscripts at the library of the University of Texas in Austin.
"Much of our work has also been carried out in the Archivo de Indias in Seville, which is an endless source of freely accessible knowledge, which is there for all but sometimes seems undervalued", says the University of Seville researcher.

Links :

• Phys :  Early example of a local nautical map from Hispanic America
• GeoGarage : Vera Cruz current nautical chart (from SEMAR)

"Inaccurate" charts or not?

This is the track of the Deerfoot 62 Moonshadow when she was headed toward a reef off Huahine.
Fortunately, it was daylight and one of the crew noticed the problem

Photo Courtesy Moonshadow
© 2017 Latitude 38 Media, LLC

From Latitude 38

French Polynesia and the South Pacific 

Following our Friday ‘Lectronic report on the loss of the Ventura-based Leopard 46 catamaran Tanda Malaika on a reef off Huahine in French Polynesia, allegedly because of inaccuracies in a Navionics electronic chart, we asked South Pacific veterans for their opinions of the accuracy of Navionics charts.

View of the reef off West coast of Huahiné
with the GeoGarage platform (SHOM 6434 1:30,000 chart, overlaid on Google imagery)

with warning : from 0 to 5 m of water for the reef with many coral potatoes...

ENC view (SHOM FR464340, scale 1:29,986)

with Bing satellite imagery on the GeoGarage platform

All charts of French Polynesia and the South Pacific, not just Navionics charts, are inaccurate, was the overwhelming response we got.

The one exception was from Alan and Laura Dwan of the Los Angeles-based Herreshoff 36 Nereia, who did the 2013 Pacific Puddle Jump and who are currently in Fiji.
“We use Navionics on our iPads and find it very accurate,” they write. However, their ‘first rule' is, “We don’t sail at night when near any island. We heave to and wait until daylight.”

Alan also wonders if Navionics charts for iPads are more accurate than the Navionics version for chartplotters.
“I have wondered about this, as virtually all of the reports of boats hitting reefs because of inaccurate Navionics charts were from boats using chartplotters and not iPads.”

Tanda Malaika being battered on the reef as seen from the French Navy helicopter.

Photo Courtesy Tanda Malaika
© 2017 Latitude 38 Media, LLC

Tanda Maliaka is currently at 16° 49' 47" S, 150° 59' 41" W, which is very close to but not exactly where she went aground, as she’s been pushed farther onto the reef by waves. (see Google Maps)
We at Latitude, and a lot of others, would like to see what N avionics and other charts show for those coordinates.

Kudos to the French Navy for a textbook nighttime rescue.

Photo Courtesy Tanda Malaika
© 2017 Latitude 38 Media, LLC

For everyone who wants to accuse the Govatos/Willis family — Danny and Belinda, and children Jude, Mycah, Aidan, and Emma — of being fools or incompetent, there are very experienced South Pacific cruisers who are cautioning not to judge so quickly.
Among them are John and Debbie Rogers of the San Diego-based Deerfoot 62 Moonshadow, who also came close to going aground on a reef at Huahine.
As they explain, there is a little more to reading electronic charts than some people think.

“On Moonshadow, we have Garmin chartplotters, Navionics charts on our iPads, various electronic charting available through the iNavX iPad app, three iPad apps that utilize Google Earth and/or Bing Satellite imagery, paper charts, and radar.

"We have found that, at times, all the navigation products are accurate. But,in the South Pacific we've also found that they sometimes disagree, and sometimes all of the charting products are laughably inaccurate.

"In Fiji, which has many reefs, we've found that the satellite imagery-based navigation apps are indispensable. But they have their limits, too, such as clouds right over the route you are planning to take!

At first glance during daylight, Tanda Malaika didn't look to be in that bad a condition.

But her bottom was already damaged beyond repair.

Photo Courtesy Tanda Malaika
© 2017 Latitude 38 Media, LLC

"The tragic end of Tanda Malaika's passage to Huahine reminded us of our passage to Huahine last year. We had plotted a route that kept us outside the 300-foot depth contours, but as our GPS track shows in the accompanying graphic, we had to make an abrupt turn to port to give us more sea room around the reef that juts out from Huahine’s western shore.

"We only did this after my son asked if we weren’t getting a bit close the the surf line. We looked up, and to our horror found that we were only about 900 feet from the surf! Had it been nighttime, we almost certainly would have ended up in that surf.

"Despite all of our resources mentioned above, we had become a bit complacent, relying only on the Garmin chartplotter to plan the course for this passage. As the accompanying images show, Garmin shows depth contours of 200, 328, and over 600 feet — in the same area where we found 10-foot breakers!

Photo Courtesy Moonshadow
© 2017 Latitude 38 Media, LLC

"To their credit, Garmin placed a thin dotted line where the reef exists, but users of the product only learn the meaning of the dotted line by hovering the cursor over the line, which calls up the warning 'Danger Line'.

"How they get away with showing those deep depth contours inside the reef is beyond me.

 Navionics chart

"Our Navionics electronic charting does a better job of showing the reef, but we didn’t cross-check the route for this passage. But we wonder if this might not be the same place where Tanda Malaika came to grief.

"Two important reminders on this subject: First, many chartplotters will only show important hazards below a certain zoom level, so it is important to routinely zoom all the way into the closest scale, then back out.

"Second, the water on these reefs is usually just one wave deep, not the massive acreage of white water you typically find along California’s coastal surf spots. Viewed from seaward, these huge waves are blue, and do not look like surf until you’re in them or really close. And once you're on those shallow reefs, it's almost impossible to get off.

"Finally, let me share some advice I learned way back in 1971 from the legendary South Pacific skipper Omer Darr upon our arrival at Huahine aboard the 58-ft gaff schooner Fairweather: Never approach South Pacific Islands at night. Omer was an extremely experienced and respected schooner captain who’d made scores of trips to the South Pacific aboard big schooners such as Te Vega and Wanderer. Aboard Fairweather, Omer had us heave to well offshore in the lee of Huahine when we arrived before dawn. So aboard Moonshadow, we always plan our departures to arrive after sunrise. If we arrive at a destination too early, we’ll heave to rather than push on into an unknown anchorage.”

Update: Just before posting this 'Lectronic, we received the following email message from Ted Simper of Roundabout II, who has been cruising in the South Pacific for several years:

"We are familiar with the reef where the catamaran went on the reef at Huahine. I feel very sorry for the family, but the reef is clearly and accurately shown on our up-to-date Navionics charts for the iPad. Even our 2011 version of Navionics on our C80 chartplotter seemed very accurate in French Polynesia. It certainly showed the reef in question off Huahine, so when we went by at night, we stood several miles off for safety."

We’ll have more on this subject, such as what can be misleading about electronic charts and how to use satellite imagery to check charts, in future ‘Lectronics and the September issue of Latitude 38.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog :  GeoGarage: Kiwi yacht owner blames outdated charts for Fiji shipwreck / After crash in Volvo Ocean Race, a team shifts its focus and an event changes its rules / Independent report into the stranding of Vestas Wind / Questions asked about Volvo Ocean Race boat grounding / Questions about electronic charts in a twenty-first century ship grounding
• Adventures of a tribe ('Tanda Malaika' blog) :  Angels among us / Saying Goodbye / Descending like vultures / Bucket list success! / MAYDAY!!!
• Cruising forum : Leopard 46 lost in French Polynesia
• Navionics : Proper use of electronic charts

Meet the man who has lived alone on this island for 28 years

Mauro Morandi has lived alone on Budelli Island for 28 years.

“What I love the most is the silence,” he says.

“The silence in winter when there isn’t a storm and no one is around, but also the summer silence of sunset.”

From National Geographic by Gulnaz Khan (Photographs by Michele Ardu)

Mauro Morandi's failing catamaran was carried to Budelli Island nearly three decades ago by chance.
He never left.

Budelli island in the North of Sardegna

with the GeoGarage platform (Navimap/IIM)

Seventy-eight-year-old Mauro Morandi often walks along the rocky shores of Budelli Island and looks out over the disconsolate sea, feeling dwarfed by the phantom forces that tug and twist the tides.
“We think we are giants that can dominate the Earth, but we’re just mosquitos,” Morandi says.

The Spiaggia Rosa, or Pink Beach, derives its rosy color from microscopic fragments of corals and shells like Miriapora truncata and Miniacina miniace.

In 1989 on a stretch of water between Sardinia and Corsica, with a crippled engine and anchor adrift, Morandi’s catamaran was gripped by these same inexorable forces and carried to the shores of Budelli Island.
When he learned that its caretaker was retiring from his post in two days, Morandi—long disenchanted with society—sold the catamaran and took his place.

Sunlight drenches Morandi's porch, where he likes to dine and read during the summer.

He has lived alone on the island for the past 28 years.

Maddalena Archipelago National Park is comprised of seven islands, and Budelli is considered the most beautiful among them for its Spiaggia Rosa, or Pink Beach.
The rose-colored sand derives its unusual hue from microscopic fragments of corals and shells, which have been slowly reduced to powder by the relentless shifting of the waves.

Morandi waves to a passing boat from his porch.

Although the beach was closed to tourists in the nineties, visitors can access limited parts of the island.

In the early nineties, Spiaggia Rosa was dubbed a place of “high natural value” by the Italian government.
The beach was closed off to protect its fragile ecosystem, and only certain areas remain accesible to visitors.
The island rapidly went from hosting thousands of tourists per day to a single heartbeat.

In 2016, after a three-year legal battle between a New Zealand businessman and the Italian government for ownership of the land, a court ruled that Budelli belonged to Maddalena National Park.
The same year, the park challenged Morandi’s right to live on the island—and the public responded.
A petition protesting his eviction garnered more than 18,000 signatures, effectively pressuring local politicians to delay his expulsion indefinitely.

Morandi practices tai chi on the beach in the morning, absorbing the sun's rays and inhaling in the salty air.

“I will never leave," Morandi says.
"I hope to die here and be cremated and have my ashes scattered in the wind.”
He believes all life is eventually reunited with the Earth—that we are all part of the same energy.
The Stoics of ancient Greece called this sympatheia, the feeling that the universe is an indivisible, unified living organism endlessly in flux.

Morandi is an avid reader, especially during the winter months.

This conviction in our interconnectedness propels Morandi to remain on the island without compensation.
Every day he collects wayward plastic that washes up on the beach and tangles with the delicate flora and fauna.
Despite his aversion to people, he guards Budelli’s shores with fervor and educates summertime visitors about the ecosystem and how to protect it.

Morandi gathers herbs behind his home.

He has a companion who delivers groceries to the island every two weeks.

“I’m not a botanist or a biologist,” Morandi says.
“Yes, I know names of plants and animals, but my work is much different than this. To be able to care for a plant is a technical task—I try to make people understand [why] the plant needs to live.”

Morandi spends many hours looking at the sea.

He believes Budelli Island is the quintessence of beauty.

Morandi believes that teaching people how to see beauty will save the world from exploitation more effectively than scientific minutiae.
“I would like people to understand that we must try not to look at beauty, but feelbeauty with our eyes closed,” he says.

During the winter, Morandi likes to watch the monstrous sea swells that are created by strong winds.

Winters on Budelli are particularly beautiful.
Morandi endures long stretches of time—upwards of 20 days—without any human contact.
He finds solace in the quiet introspection it affords him, and often sits on the beach with nothing but the operatic sounds of the wind and waves to punctuate the silence.

“I’m sort of in prison here," Morandi says of his seclusion,

"but it’s a prison that I chose for myself.”

Morandi collects juniper logs and shapes them into sculptures.

He sells them to tourists and donates the money to NGOs in countries from Africa to Tibet.

Though he inhabits a small piece of land, he is acutely aware of the world at large

Morandi passes the time with creative pursuits.
He fashions juniper wood into sculptures, finding faces hidden in their nebulous forms.
He reads zealously and meditates on the wisdom of Greek philosophers and literary prodigies.
He takes pictures of the island, marveling at how it changes from hour to hour, season to season.

During all his years on the island, Morandi says he has never gotten sick, a quality he attributes to "good genes."

This is not unusual for people who spend extensive periods of time alone.
Scientists have long posited that solitude generates creativity, as evidenced by scores of artists, poets, and philosophers throughout the ages who produced their greatest works in seclusion from society.

Morandi is silhoutted against the light of the dying sun—his favorite time of day when the world seems to grow quiet.

"We think we’re super-humans and divine creatures, but we’re really nothing in my opinion," he says.

"We must adapt to nature.”

The benefits of solitude may not be universal. “Solitude can be stressful for members of technologically advanced societies who have been trained to believe that aloneness is to be avoided,” explains Pete Suedfeld in Loneliness: A Sourcebook of Current Theory, Research and Therapy. However, there are still cultures around the world in which solitary life remains a venerated tradition.
Buddhist monasticism, for example, encourages spiritual devotion and scholarly pursuit above seeking bodily pleasures.

Morandi says he never feels lonely because he is constantly surrounded by life.

But amidst rapid globalization, humans' ability to experience true solitude is perhaps a thing of the past.
In response to increasing development of the region, an internet company established a Wi-Fi connection on Budelli, connecting Morandi and his beloved piece of paradise to the world through social media.
Embracing this new form of communication is his concession on behalf of a larger purpose—to facilitate a bond between people and nature by exposing them to its beauty.
A bond Morandi hopes will motivate people to care for the withering planet.

 Red Desert ( Il deserto rosso) is a 1964 Italian film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and starring Monica Vitti with Richard Harris.

The film is about a woman struggling to hide her mental illness from her husband while trying to survive in the modern world of cultural neurosis and existential doubt.

Her relationship with her husband's business associate helps her confront her isolation.

Red desert was Antonioni's first color film, one of the filming location was the little island of Budelli in Sardinia.

“Love is an absolute consequence of beauty and vice versa,” Morandi says.
“When you love a person deeply you see him or her as beautiful, but not because you see them as physically beautiful … you empathize with them, you’ve become a part of her and she’s become a part of you. It’s the same thing with nature.”

Huge landslide triggered rare Greenland mega-tsunami

Tsunami waves hit western Greenland after huge landslide - 01:00 UTC, June 18, 2017. 

From Nature by Quirin Schiermeier

Scientists hope studying last month’s deadly event will improve modelling of rockslides that could become more frequent with climate change.

One of the tallest tsunamis in recorded history — a 100-metre-high wave that devastated a remote settlement in Greenland last month — was caused, unusually, by a massive landslide, researchers report.

Seismologists returning from studying the rare event hope that the data they have collected will improve models of landslide mechanics in glacial areas and provide a better understanding of the associated tsunami risks.
They warn that such events could become more frequent as the climate warms.

Chunks of glacier shattered when a powerful tsunami ripped through a fjord in western Greenland in June.

(Hermann Fritz)

The landslide occurred on the evening of 17 June, in the barren Karrat Fjord on the west coast of Greenland.
It caused a sudden surge of seawater that wreaked havoc in the fishing village of Nuugaatsiaq, located on an island within the fjord about 20 kilometres away (see ‘Greenland tsunami’).
The wave washed away eleven houses, and four people are presumed dead.

 The right half of the highlighted area shows the scarred hillside in Greenland’s Karrat Fjord after a landslide fell a kilometer into the water below, causing a tsunami that reached 90 meters.

The left half shows at-risk areas.

The trip was funded by National Science Foundation and the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance Association.

(Hermann Fritz)

The slide was so large that it generated a seismic signal suggestive of a magnitude-4.1 earthquake, confounding initial efforts to identify its cause, says Trine Dahl-Jensen, a seismologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.
But more careful examination indicated no significant tectonic activity just before the landslide.

A research team that visited the site earlier this month found that a large volume of rock had plunged — probably spontaneously — from one of the steep sides of the fjord into the water 1,000 metres below, and shattered chunks of a glacier.
That disturbance pushed water levels up by more than 90 metres along the coastline on the same side as the slide.
And although the tsunami dissipated quickly as it crossed the deep, six-kilometre-wide fjord, it still had enough energy to send water 50 metres up the hillside opposite.
The team also measured an increase in water levels of about 10 metres on shorelines 30 kilometres away.
“Landslide-generated tsunamis are much more locally limited than tsunamis produced by sea quakes, but they can be massively tall and devastating in the vicinity,” says Hermann Fritz, an environmental engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta who led the research team.

 A deadly tsunami hit a remote region of Greenland, leaving four people presumed dead. Dozens more were injured and 11 homes were washed away.

The area near the small town of Nuugaatsiaq has a population of about 84.

Experts think the tsunami could have been caused by a rare 4.0 magnitude earthquake or possibly by a large landslide in the area that could have tricked sensors into registering a seismic event.

see National Geographic

On the rocks

Fritz and his team hope to produce a 3D reconstruction of the Greenland event.

The relative positions of the landslide and Nuugaatsiaq.
Copernicus Sentinel data, 2017.

Such information is sorely needed, says Costas Synolakis, a tsunami researcher at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles who was not involved in the Greenland survey.
In cold, glacial regions, rocks and ice are held together on steep rock sides, and rising temperatures could make these slopes unstable and these events more common.

 Rink Glacier on Greenland's west coast.

John Sonntag,NASA

Synolakis says that his team has documented in detail only two landslides near glaciers.
“We need at least ten such events to be able to have some rudimentary confidence in landslide computational models to study future impacts and establish early warning criteria.”

The tsunami wreaked havoc on the small village of Nuugaatsiaq, located on an island within a fjord.

(Hermann Fritz)

Researchers have noted another potentially imminent landslide in the Karrat Fjord, says Fritz, where a slow trickle of rocks could turn into abrupt slide.
Residents of three villages in the region have been permanently evacuated to the nearby town of Uummannaq.

Fritz adds that the Greenland event is reminiscent of a 1958 tsunami — the tallest ever recorded — in Lituya Bay, Alaska.
A magnitude-8.3 quake triggered a landslide into a narrow fjord and the bay’s shallow water, causing the water to rise 500 metres above the normal tide level (a measure known as run-up).
By comparison, the 2011 quake-triggered tsunami in Japan, which killed more than 16,000 people and caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster, reached only about 40 metres at its maximum height.

And in 2015, a landslide-generated tsunami in the Taan Fjord in Icy Bay, Alaska, caused a 300-metre run-up of water, says Synolakis.
“Earlier, we didn’t really believe such extremes were possible,” he says.
“But with global warming and sea level rise, such landslides are going to be far more common.”


Links :

• Nature : Greenland once lost nearly all its ice — and could again
• BBC : In pictures: Greenland tsunami aftermath / Four missing after tsunami strikes Greenland coast
• New Scientist : Melting ice may be making mountains collapse in Greenland
• Quartz : A rare mega-tsunami in Greenland is helping researchers prepare for a new climate-change threat
• Google Earth blog : Landslide and Tsunami in Greenland
• AGU : Much more detail about the Greenland landslide and tsunami, including images and video
• NOC : Why are landslide generated tsunamis dangerous?
• USGS : Preliminary Analysis of Satellite Imagery and Seismic Observations of the Nuugaatsiaq Landslide and Tsunami, Greenland 

Bathymetry of Mediterranean sea

published by the head department of navigation and oceanography,
Ministry of Defence, Leningrad, USSR, 1st edition, June 1981) / IOC

published by the head department of navigation and oceanography,
Ministry of Defence, Leningrad, USSR, 1st edition, June 1981) / IOC

Sismic map (CBIM-S)
published by the head department of navigation and oceanography,
Ministry of Defence, Leningrad, USSR, 1st edition, June 1981) / IOC

International bathymetric chart of the Mediterranean (IBCM) : thickness of the Plio-quatenary sediments (IBCM-PQ), compiled under the direction of P. Burollet, M. Gennesseaux, P. Kuprin, E. Tzotzolakis, and E. Winnock.

 National Geographic, dec. 1982

A map of the Mediterranean from the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco
(1875-1914 ?)


Carte Nouvelle De La Mer Mediterranee, 1694

 

Miguel Valenzuela