One last map request

Note: this blog won't die... monthly hits almost 20K mid-April! Seen on desktop here, that also lists top reads.

Update: added a new map adding to an existing Antarctic project at the bottom

Pyrenées

When visiting the nearby village of Pontacq (Flickr & village site), the glorious sunshine showed the Pic do Midi de Bigorre (Wikipedia) so clearly we could see the observatory atop! It's the left peak in the central massif below.

click to enlarge, view SW from nr. Pontacq

So what might be the geology that created the layers clearly outlined in the melting snow? It so happened I already has French geological survey's 1:1M map already on my computer, so I created a 3D view lookig neast along strike - along the ridges - underlain by the geology. You see the layer ribbons following the ridges in this perspective view:

click to enalrge, full size here

This effect comes from using so-called overlay blending: it allows the topography to peek thru the geology - natural as the former is created by the latter - already used it in this story map here and recent blog here to show relief and infrastructure in N England. See this blog on this topic here.

Antarctica

Quantarctica (here) is an open data source on the QGIS map platform (here) I used since 2013: I posted a comprehensive GIS exercise (here) for the Antarctica using that, and the Arctic on arcgis.com; this among a number of DIY maps posted (here, start w "Read me first") on sea level rise in East Anglia and digital elevation maps in NW Europe.

Just this month, however, a paper was published to describe how the sub-ice geology slows down the oceanward ice-creep & thus the ice melt and consequent sea level rise! Here are the relevant sources:

Extensive fluvial surfaces at the East Antarctic margin have modulated ice-sheet evolution

Guy J. G. Paxman et al., July 2025

WilkesLand_flat_surfaces (Zenodo)

Open access dataset (Nature Geoscience)

RINGS/Bedmap3 grounding line of the Antarctic Ice Sheet

simpleGL: RINGS Quantarctica-friendly data package (Quantarctica)

Antarctic geographical datasets with the free, cross-platform, open-source software QGIS (Quantarctica3)

I simply added these datasets to a basic Quantarctica map, simplifed to post in QGIScloud (here):

(direct web map here & WMS/WFS/WMCS here)

QGIS snapshot (click to enlarge)

Note:  same as the Nature article & data, this is all CC BY-SA 4.0 (here): please leave a comment below for any info on the above.