Arctic Waterfront, a measure of geopolitical stakes

 A mid-2011 post Beautiful maps in current affairs stated 

UN Convention on the Law of the Sea [...] by Dr Parson of the Southampton UK National Oceanographic Centre [...] described how nations were given an opportunity to claim Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) beyond the standard 200 nautical mile limit (viz. UNCLOS and UNEP). [...]

click to enlarge, original post

Recent news about sabre-rattling in the South China Sea prompted me to look up the actual EEZ boundaries, which I had downloaded for a project mentioned earlier - this issue also discussed re: the Arctic here and here - the area in dispute jumps out of the map just posted on arcgis.com.0 Its immensity is very apparent by using the Measure tool: roughly three quarter million square kilometres or a quarter million square miles!

Well, the sabre-rattling has hardly abated - anyone heard of Greenland lately? - and I re-used a previous Arctic map  to extend the stats hinted at above. The Arctic NATO countries are the seven NATO members that have territory within the Arctic Circle: Canada, the United States, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden... and Arctic Review stats send me mapping to fact-check!

• 8 Arctic countries (incl. Russia)
• 53% of Arctic Ocean’s coastline lies in Russia
• 50% of Norway’s land lies above the Arctic Circle
• 1/2of Canadian Arctic's inhabitants are  Indigenous Peoples

click to enlarge, full size here

Enlarge the map to see A: Grinnell Pen. on Devon Isl. below centre, B: Wrangel Isl.  in then Soviet Arctic Chukchi Sea "not far" from the US border centre left, and C: Beechey Isl. below centre where the first remains of the Franklin Expedition were found three years later (Wikipedia). The N Pole is the triple junction at centre.

A: this is no new concern either - blog here & following - my summer in the Arctic Isl. exactly 40 yrs ago exposed me to not a little lore - this blog here & here, other blog here - indeed on many a fog-bound day when we got tired of playing cribbage (Wikipedia), listening to East German radio extolling the virtues of Communism (this was 1985) or to Talking Heads the band of the day, we wondered what the Arctic waterfront looked like for our neighbours the US, and then USSR across the North Pole? 

As I compiled the Arctic Islands geology then, I talked to the National Topographic Survey. Did you know that new-found geographic features were named off the next fallen soldiers on a roll of WWI & WWII conscription? Quebec stopped that, renaming them back to First Nations incl. Inuit originals. And there were some exceptions like Butter Porridge Bay, named by Fritjoff Nansen who overwintered there and their treat was a dollop of butter on their porridge on Christmas Eve (maybe an urban Arctic legend, Perplexity, though I swear I saw it on a map)... And viz. C below, if there was a Terror Bay in that area well before that ship's rediscovery, who was not telling us what they knew?!

click to enlarge, original here

But I digress: there was an informal way of estimating "waterfront" by simply dividing the Exclusive Economic Zone area by the shoreline length facing the Arctic Ocean - this was in particular why the Falklands War was started: Argentina would double its Antarctic waterfront if they were "Las Malvinas" (indeed Breton & Basque 19th c. whalers called them "Les Malouines"); claims to Antarctic research zones were based on said waterfront - are the stats and the map above not interesting in terms of who claims sovereignty where?

B: one of the geologists ended up on Wrangel Isl. the next year as part of cooperative exchange. As mentioned in previous blogs, Canada was not under US hegemony, and there was petroleum exploration in Cuba & Libya, or there was a biweekly charter plane over the North Pole from Calgary to Novosibirsk at the time. The Polar Continental Shelf Program was also to put "boots on the ground" and help claim the entire pie from Beaufort Sea E of Alaska to North Pole and down Nares Strait W of Greenland, which of course the US challenges... Ergo the geologic exchange program between the matching Geological Surveys of then Soviet Union (FEGI in Vladivostok) & Canada (GSC in Calgary)!

C: Owen Beattie from the University of Alberta - in Edmonton two hours drive north of Calgary - and the Arctic Institute of North America - across the street from the GSC and top floor of the University of Calgary Geosciences building - set the wheels in motion of rediscovering the fate of the Franklin Expedition that made the news a couple of decades later with the discovery of the Terror and the Erebus, the scientific vessels that carried the fateful expedition to, but not through the Northwest Passage.

I hope you enjoyed this armchair romp thru history & geography by way of maps that show it all off so well, don't they? Please feel free to comment below, or to check my socials footprint on the web version of this blog!

Bird-dogging COVID, a five year retrospect

This follows on the last COVID update  here, 5 yrs. after polling COVID stats Jan. 2020 to May 2021.

I went to London exactly 6 yrs. ago to get my Canadian passport: my UK "settled status" as a French national wasn't in yet; if they didn't take me as EU citizen, they couldn't refuse me as Commonwealth citizen... I met my best friend in Chinatown to witness my passport pics, before I went to the consulate to renew my passport... Well Chinatown was already all set up with one-way ingress-egress in stores, social distancing & face masks! The consulate also closed for no reason given. So, everyone but uk.guv seemed to know what had started in China late Nov. early Dec 2019 had already arrived here... 

Exhuming my thesis, part IV

This follows on my previous post here of a series started here. Also here under Great Lakes with a different perspective. And here its pivotal role in my career. Lastly a case of "AI to the rescue", it's  listed on my blog's pinned post under 2026. 

In my initial post of this series, I wrote (caps added):

That prompted me now to look up geophysical data (aeromagnetic anomalies, Wikipedia): will it allow to GLIMPSE terranes in the subsurface below the Great Lakes, as well as earlier Archean and later Phanerozoic features such as, respectively, the Wawa Lineament and the Niagara Escarpment? Lo-and-behold, I found aeromagnetic data (NOAA) and sketch-mapped them below on my desktop GIS (Esri)!

Richard Cœur de Lion's return trip

This follows on from new maps posted on history & newmaps.

Medievalist.net posted here a rethink of the circumstances of Lionheart's return from the Third Crusade, summary here and in three-sentences:

The article presents Attila Bárány’s argument that Richard I’s capture after the Third Crusade was primarily a product of high politics, not an accident of storms, pride, or divine punishment. Richard’s secretive, indirect route home and his decision to pass through risky territories are treated as calculated responses to the political threats posed by figures like Philip Augustus and Emperor Henry VI, who could profit from his detention. Leopold V’s personal resentment is seen as a catalyst rather than a sufficient cause, with Richard’s captivity and ransom functioning as tools of imperial strategy and diplomatic theatre.

Even more maps, with a twist

In this opening view from this video here, doesn't the Grand Canyon appear inverted to you? As in the deep parts pop up instead of down!

click to enlarge 

"All you have to do is ask AI", sometimes

Let's follow on this post here about more intriguing geomorphology (land forms underpinned by geology), with a little help from AI in the first instance.

Hungary 

LinkedIn @markku-ylisirniö posted here a cool map of Hungary:

screen grab from original post, click to enlarge 

East Anglia environment in a global context

 This follows on blogposts about East Anglia in general here. The last post on infrastructure affected by sea level rise is here. Contrast below Environment England's Risk of flooding from river and from sea at left for waters coming naturalls from onshore & offsore, and my Seal level rise model by simply intersecting various sea level elevations and Ordnance Survey topogaphy (intro here and workshop here). Think of it below as fresh water largely going NE to the North Sea at left, and at right as sea water encroaching largely SW onto the land:

A Roman Holiday

This follows on a map story here. Next history map is here.

Update : check out below how a new map, itiner-e, updated the Roman Roads view.

Update 2: speaking of malaria in second map, appended maps on trade routes that triggered the Black Plague in the 14th c. Mediterranean.

Not William Wilder's 1953 Gregory Peck & Audrey Hepburn flick (Wikipedia)! When drawing up a map of Apostolic Palestine for local Catholics, I ran across Ancient World Mapping Center (AWMC) at UNC-Chapel Hill. While their web app (ArcGIS Online) is a cool one-stop-shop for their rich data set - for ex. I cannot do point clustering (Comet Assistant) with my standard Argis Pro desktop license -  I loaded, picked apart an re-sorted some of their data for some interesting insights. 

AI to recreate a lost picture

This follows on AI "lessons-learned, lessons shared", last post here and master post here.

Here is another use of Google Gemini AI. A LinkedIn discussion here described fog/cloud banks in Cen. & Nor. Cal. against nearby ridges.  I commented on same viz. Yucaipa Valley & Ridge in So. Cal. Here is my comment:

How to build AI Agents

This follows on my AI "lessons-learned,  lessons-shared" mainly on my Ongoing Crash Course pinned atop this blog, that links all items on my various socials.

Maryam Maradi (LinkedIn) shared on-going how-to's I pay-forward here to the rest of the world. I posted the texts on the links below her excellent posters also in-text (click to enlarge). My (liked) comment on her second post was:

This is so excellent! I'm a geologist & GIS-er of 40-odd yrs., w interest in geophysics in general & seismic in particular. I have never seen such a comprehensive review and sign of hope for disaster response... Thanks!