Andrew Zolnai Blog

Views top a million since Sept. 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Sat, 30 May 2026 06:13:20 +0000

Update: the last three posts picked up further AI using GIS, AI to convey complex astronomy and global-to-local integration efforts re: Climate Emergency. See the last two posts on my companion blog here closing my social commentary launched in Kuwait. My Medium Professional Channel also closed on a humorous take on AI here, & my Personal Channel did here. Note also "last post" entries in my feature AI 'magnum opus' here. Note finally my internet footprint on the banner menu of this blog's web view here...

"So long, farewell, auf wieder-sehen, goodby-ye!" (apols to "The Sound of Music" here).

Is reaching this milestone not fitting on the blog's 15½th anniversary? The 20th anniversary of my return from the US, a mo. to the 50th of emigrating to Canada, & 6 mo. to the 40th of my original pre-internet post ( see 1986, top left banner menu of this blog's web view here)?

As cumulative hits exceed the 1⅛M mark, let's update the last recap here.

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This is how I ended my feature blogpost on AI:

September marked 15 years of blogging: quite happy with 375 posts garnering over 750K hits topping 50K monthly, up from under 10K before addressing AI; see my next post for stats in the context of web history incl. mine. My web footprint is on the banner menu of this blog's web view, where you can see hits at top right.
Update: March 15 2026 exceeded 1M hits at 400 posts with monthlies nearing 50K hits. Note that Sept. 2020 had ½M hits... so hits doubled in last 5 out of 15 yrs.!

Detailed evolution per Copilot

I tabulated monthly hits since the beginning here, and the pivot table (Wikipedia) summarizes 15½ yrs in tabular and graphic form:

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Copilot AI traversed the 15½ yrs to tabulate its themes as follows:

Copilot synthesizes it into a Emergence Timeline:

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Copilot estimates a qualitative Intensity Timeline:

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It creates this Visual Temporal Graph:

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Footnote: is it not amazing how Copilot suggested the method, ran the Python script based on the blog to post this graph... all without writing a line of code?!

And finally we have a Color‑Coded Theme Matrix (ASCII Heatmap):

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🧭 What this matrix reveals:
1. GIS dominates early, then stabilizes
   A strong red block on the left, tapering to yellow — your technical foundation.
2. Climate peaks sharply in the middle
   A bright red column in the Climate Era — your environmental deep dive.
3. History explodes suddenly
   A dramatic jump from green to full red in the Medieval Era.
4. Personal + Narrative become your late‑era engines
   The Integrative Era glows red at the bottom — your reflective, essayistic turn.
5. Tools fade but never vanish
   A warm orange → yellow → green gradient — always present, never dominant.

________________________

4/9/2026 update:

The hardest problem AI ever solved, with Google Deep Mind CEO

In the 1st ¼ hr., I get vindicated for putting my work on the web free-to-reuse (called CC BY-SA 4.0 at the bottom of this blog's web view): AlphaFold was put on the web for free & pretty well every drug is now made today using it (~ 13:00 mark). See also their full movie at the bottom of my feat. post atop my blog. Aside from the million hit mark above, this is a nice way to wrap up my "the internet is free" socials, isn't it?

Update: ditto, bottom of "AI-ding Tools" here, "How Nature Solved Robotics" here ends up sharing widely the know-how around DIY robotics to help improve collective learning... I rest my case!

Climate & ecological emergency (CEE) from global to local

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Wed, 27 May 2026 14:18:38 +0000

David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth, 1970s environmental slogan “think globally, act locally” needs to be recast ½ c. later to “think globally, observe locally” in order to better act locally: that is why I push Citizen Science thru this blog & provide tools, say, to build your own maps here; see the banner map on the desktop not mobile blog here.

I bird-dogged the increased flooding thru SusCott in East Anglia prior to joining Extinction Rebellion (XR) then starting & morphing Cambrdgeshire.ai (here) five years ago. I'm a geologist who was paid, after all, to observe, assess & interpret, see opener here:

... a geologic principle [is] that small-scale features - the texture of a rock fragment at left - reflect much larger ones - local land form at right to entire mountain chains - within a knowledge framework...

Flysch sample & outcrop, Gan, SW FR (Greg Zolnai, 1984)

Here is a WhatsApp chat with an old XR friend re: the late return of swallows, swifts & house martins - I myself remember the return of the swallows in San Juan Capistrano (here) when living in So. Cal. - these are photos taken recently at the Château de Pau in SW FR, swifts(?) in close-up at top:

click to enlarge (may be slow)

"In Pau SW FR they're almost a month late, I think they were kept south by the Arctic air mass swept southward, when an anticyclone stalled over the No. Atlantic last couple weeks.

Saw the same at 90° exactly 40 yrs. ago, "the summer that never was" - 40 frost-free days in Calgary, W CAN & snow never left the ground in the high Arctic I was at that summer [see also here] - brant geese were swept far W from Greenland by the same sort of stalled anticyclone, except they were on its W side of it then (the last week's cold here was E of the current anticyclone).
That's cold air drawn S from Arctic down the E side of the anticyclone stalled over the N Atlantic. We usually say "le fond de l'air est frais" (the air is cool in the background) in the spring, but here's it's the opposite with a cold breeze stirring warmer ambient air... it still lingers in the current 32°C 90°F heatwave cooled to 27°C 80°F by remnant cool air still blown about... That heat wave is now caused by that anticyclone stalled over NW Europe now!
Cold air like humid air is dense and creates "conveyor belts", hence its sharpness last couple of weeks. Worst conveyor belt was Tropical Storm Debby in 2024. The air was so saturated & heavy that it failed to deflect NE at the coast as per normal, and continued straight on NW over the Appalachian Mountains: at altitude it dumped its super-saturated humidity & heavily flooded the valley bottoms; that never had happened historically, so the infrastructure was all in the wrong places, and valley bottoms were devastated. My cousins were lucky as they lived halfway up the mountainside.
CEE is not so much the higher even the more wildly variant temps etc. It's the fact it takes millions of years for plants to adapt & millennia for civilizations to settle in the right places, centuries even to move. It's violent weather like floods and storms that extend into fall / spring & disrupt vegetation / infrastructure: what took centuries before now take just decades to change... Ergo asynchronous processes with no chance to catch up never mind adapt!
I think trees are deciduous wintertimes for two reasons: a) less light means lesser sacrifice for chlorophyll to function; b) no leaves mean storms blow thru trees without toppling them. Today however, not only do storms occur in leafier fall & spring, but soil is also more saturated from increased rain & flood: this means double-trouble with leaves catching the wind & roots not gripping firmly; that in turn disrupts nesting - there was a lost generation of swifts in East Anglia 5 yrs. ago around spring floods - it also disrupts the synchronization among flowering / bugs / nesting stressing bird life in fields & gardens." [I lived then at the edge of a village just N of Cambridge UK.]

These observations are not scientific, but they do point to link the local with the global as per intro. This has been recently suggested by the call for an integrative approach to study the CEE. "Matching climate to biological scales" (Trends in Ecology & Evolution) asks ecologists and evolutionary biologists to consider how organisms experience climate rather than how weather stations record it when doing climate–biology research.

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One useful outcome following my anecdote could be to study how climate change is causing "phenological mismatches" among flowers, insects, and birds to disrupt pollination and spring food webs. Perplexity AI:

"Climate change is shifting the timing of flowering, insect emergence, and bird migration at different rates, so food and pollination links no longer line up as well. That can reduce pollination, leave insects or birds short of food, and weaken spring growth and reproduction.
What is decoupling?
Plants often respond to warmer temperatures by flowering earlier in spring, while insects and birds may shift their timing too, but not always by the same amount or in the same direction. When these schedules drift apart, flowers may bloom before pollinators arrive, or birds may arrive after peak insect abundance.
Why it matters in spring
For flowering plants, successful reproduction depends on pollinators being present at the right time. For birds, especially migratory species, success can depend on insect peaks or other seasonal food resources that now may be earlier or shorter-lived.
Typical effects

lower pollination success when insects miss the flowering window.
reduced food availability for birds if insect outbreaks or fruiting periods shift.
broader stress on ecosystems because interactions across the food web become less synchronized"

AI drew Lagrange Points in a jiffy

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Sat, 23 May 2026 17:20:21 +0000

Astrodynamics published here a new route to the moon that saves fuel & avoids comms break when moon lies between Earth & spaceship.

It uses a Lagrange point of equilibrium between two planets where an object can be left w no energy needed to keep it there. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST Wikipedia) is the best known at L2 w the Sun, the new lunar route the L1 in Earth Moon pair.

I first heard of it decades ago in Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga (Wikipedia): Joshua Calvert, nicknamed “Lagrange” Calvert in the Night’s Dawn trilogy became famous for risky navigation and jump travel associated with Lagrange-point maneuvers (Perplexity).

I simply asked Copilot to diagram them, shown as-is:

The Earth–Sun L1 point lies between Earth and the Sun, about 1.5 million km sunward; the Earth–Sun L2 point lies on the opposite side of Earth, also about 1.5 million km away.

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full Earth–Sun–Moon Lagrange system, imagine three nested orbital layers, Earth–Sun System, Earth–Moon System & Orbital Paths and Geometry

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Earth-Moon L1 between Earth and the Moon along the line connecting their centers roughly 58 000 km from the Moon’s surface, or about 326 000 km from Earth, & L2 beyond the Moon’s far side, directly opposite Earth about 64 000 km past the Moon, or roughly 448 000 km from Earth

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dynamic orbital version showing how spacecraft actually move around the Earth–Moon L1 and L2 points in three dimensions

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full 3‑body potential‑surface map

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The full Copilot conversation is here. Leave a comment below how these work for you. Also explore my blog's banner post here for more on AI.

Exhuming my thesis, part V

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Wed, 20 May 2026 09:07:03 +0000

This follows on Part IV with further AI investigation in GIS that created the maps in previous Parts. This is also an update on my Community Engagement series ending here. Our non-profit has an opportunity to re-engage GIS & AI after my partner attended an AGI meeting on same. I plan to repatriate to pursue this, stay tuned.

We decided to pursue AI offerings on QGIS as it's free - my other account off maintenance curtails my access to AI tools - and the prognosis looks good. First I did a review of what's available in Google Gemini here. The update esp. the closing caveat were particularly useful.

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Here are the latest AI plugins on the latest version of QGIS.

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I loaded my last project I used in QGIS to review my thesis 40 years on, starting here & updated right here. The integrated chatbot question is at lower left, and the answer at middle right confirms that I have used the appropriate data set for regional geophysical data to study geologic terranes in that area.

As with AI topics in my blog feature post here - see this here posted ¼ way down - let me update you on GIS & AI as I keep exploring... Drop in comments below where you think I should use AI in GIS?

Two Antiquities leaders by the map

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 14:16:00 +0000

This follows on "Ancient Roman environment" paragraph halfway down here: the blog post about the Roman road network ended up observing the vastly different water regime in ancient Mesopotamia.

Update: I renamed the blogpost to add a second map of Marcus Aurelius along the Danube, see also the footnote.

Alexander the Great in Mesopotamia

Fox News Digital ran a feature titled Alexander the Great's long-lost city located after nearly two millennia: ‘Absolutely stunning’ about Alexandria-on-the-Tigris (Charax Spasinou, summary at bottom). That falls smack dab in the middle of that map region. I simply recycled the previous map with Ancient World Mapping Center (AWMC) at UNC-Chapel Hill data for that period.

Charax Spasinou was originally founded as Alexandria (or Alexandria on the Tigris) by Alexander the Great in 324 BC, replacing a small Persian settlement called Durine. It was later rebuilt by Antiochus IV and briefly renamed Antiochia (or Antiochia in Susiana).

Their metadata are here, as well as two archaeological reports here and here on the last decades' excavations: check out the stunning shallow geophysical mapping results for what may have been the largest port city of mid-first millennium BC.

I sorted the Pleiades ancient place names database for features that mention Alexander (the Great) and found only two. Alexandria didn't show up, so I simply pulled the location and plotted it on the map.

click to enlarge, original here

You can clearly see why the port "then declined as the Tigris shifted and the Gulf shoreline migrated, leaving the port stranded" (summary below): the current shoreline today is way south of Alexandria then; that is the same with ports at the time of the Crusades on the French medieval coast of Provence.

Here are the previous maps from the prior blog that show the change in water regime mentioned atop:

click to enlarge, from blog post

Here is the News Summary in Perplexity AI.

Marcus Aurelius on the Danube

I created this poster for a local French group (Flickr), who asked where did he write his Meditations? It was known that he wrote them like a journal to himself - some title it "Pensées pour moi-même" not intended initially for publication - but what were the campaigns & circumstances? I simply asked Gemini in French and mapped this prompt/query / table:

click to enlarge, A4 original, table

The National Geographic background with no annotations show the Roman Empire. I added the Danube for reference. Here is the table in English, the map is self evident:

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Footnote: having found his "Meditations" on Gutenberg Project for free, I found I can load it into Kindle!

Continental drift not push-me but pull-you, the Rockhall Plateau

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 11:31:00 +0000

A funny thing happened when I showed my last blog post to my mom: "what is that blob right above where it says 'Atlantic Ocean'?". Widow and mother to geologists, she learned to read maps: she spotted the Rockhall Rise as it shows in the zoomed-in view below; it's also known as Rockhall Plateau (Perplexity), briefly a piece of crust left behind in the spreading of the North Atlantic. The tectonic plate margins, incl. the mid-Atlantic Ridge top right, are highlighted in cyan below. Same as the second-last blogpost showed interesting geomorphology only seen in North polar view, this portion of the far North Atlantic also shows better than in a normal or equatorial map view shown at right.

click to enlarge (can be slow), original

I first heard of the Rockhall Plateau in then-new plate tectonics classes by John Dewey & Kevin Burke (Can. Jour. Earth Sci.) @ Univ. of Calgary in 1980, and then Ed Farrar (Queen's U.) @ Queen's Uni. in 1982, resp. in W & E Canada. They distinguished rafts left behind like this, from fragments left in place like the Seychelles & Reunion in the Indian Ocean. The discussion resulted 40 yrs later in seeing tectonic plates dragged by sinking ocean trenches at the margins, rather than pushed by mid oceanic ridges at the center (Perplexity). See also this blog post about continent & ocean rafts & terranes re: exhuming my thesis 40 yrs later.

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So what my mom spotted jumps out if you look at it carefully above:

the Reykjanes Ridge portion of the mid-Atlantic Ridge shows a spread at a slight angle (dashed line) to the median itself (cyan), with matching original continental shelf margins (brown)
the Rockhall Plateau is however separated from the UK Ireland mass by a trough with matching continental shelf outlines (blue), not unlike the original brown ones
if the mid-oceanic ridge were the motor, the plateau would have been pressed against not separated from the NW Europe continental mass
the small offset orphaned ridge next to the Faroe Islands further underscores the pull you rather than the push me aspect
this is a patent example on geomorphology alone, and a keen eye, of the slab pull driver of plate tectonics, rather than ridge push or mantle drag theories detailed in the Perplexity link above.

Thanks to @John Nelson LinkedIn post here, w far superior cartography on global plate tectonics, inspired in turn by his daughter - this rattled about in my brain and y'all prompted me to post it - aptly enough, our posts bridge International Women's Day!

Mapping Arctic Boreal Peatlands, cont.

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:38:00 +0000

This follows on the original post here, with more news on "Arctic fires" that are counterintuitive a priori:

Perplexity summary of NASA captured it from space, and it looks like a bad joke: fire burning on the ice of the North Pole. The scary thing is that it has been multiplying for 10 years: NASA satellites have detected a dramatic rise in Arctic wildfires over the past decade, with fires spreading farther north into icy regions, fuelled by an Arctic warming four times faster than the global average. These blazes, now more frequent and intense, are shifting from the Arctic's edges to a broad northern band, burning drier tundra and releasing ancient carbon from permafrost, turning some areas into carbon sources. Lightning ignites many of these deep-burning fires, whose smoke travels globally, worsening air quality and signalling urgent climate impacts as noted in recent Arctic assessments.

Did you know I had a "Fire & Ice" Story Map - now gone, see indent here why, see also Day 27 here - but I have the data for the previous decades showing the history:

Here is what it looked like in detail:

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Above was 2001-2019. Below is this month's update, in the context of the previous post's Global Peatlands: and to follow on the previous blog post's introductory paper (here), how were they affected by climate change since then?

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... What is alarming is that the fire distribution correlates in many areas with peatland distribution! The slide deck shows it's difficult to quantify, but it's a stunning result that underscores this blog post's introductory paper.

click to enlarge, top-right of image above
turned upside-down

Even more alarming if unrelated is the North Sea: there are no islands in the central part, only Shetlands, Orkney & Faroe to the North - in sharp brown c/w fuzzy red fire tracks - it begs the question if those are offhore platforms flaring gas and if it's legal? The 'good' news is it's regulated (Perplexity), the bad news it was at its highest in 2024 since 2007!

Who needs the failed MethaneSAT (Perplexity) when you can see the visible (and most egregious) part w NASA VIIRS satellite data...

Feel free to comment below, puh-lease steal the Geopackage here for all platforms (use symbology above) or ESRI map package here (incl. symbology), and note the Creative Commons notice at the bottom of the blog. Where to start? "Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask" about DIY mapping is here (start with: Read Me First)...

A view from the top of the world

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 10:21:00 +0000

This follows on from 3D maps in current affairs: it showed an intriguing feature bisecting the Arctic on a proxy topography for the earth's crust; it's only visible on a Polar Stereographic projection, looking straight down the North Pole, mapped here for features N of 50° N lat.

This was seen when mapping ArcticDEM - High-resolution Elevation Models of the Arctic (Esri Living Atlas) and Seabed Sediment Thickness (clipped to N of 50°N, Esri Living Atlas). From the poster & overlay at the bottom:

Hi-res. DEM and sediment thickness are a proxy for depth-to-basement. Approximating a level seafloor in a closed ocean with no continental shelf or abyssal plain, they form a continuous above- and below-sea-level proxy continent surface topography minus ice and sediments. The marked N-S lineament across North Pole likely reflects a crustal mega structure from the southern Baltic Sea to along the Alaska-Yukon border.

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Anecdote: the Lomonosov Ridge, looking above like the hand of a clock centred at the North Pole and indicating 08:30, is the basis for Russia to claim the North Pole as that ridge extends to it from Russia (Perplexity).

This visual has an actual underpining in the bedrock geology:

the tectonic plate boundaries (Esri Education Services) running roughly left to right in this Alaska polar sterographic projection reflect the mid-oceanic ridges. Notice the sudden bend toward the vertical on this projection, forming a chicane immediately above the North Pole..
the subsea geology shows also marked breaks & offsets in the bedrock geology compiled by the Geological Survey of Canada (Arctic Circumpolar GSC EN 1:5M Offshore Bedrock_Geology from Geological Map of the Arctic, 1:5 000 000).

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Does it not seem like that break in the bedrock geology lines up with the chicane in the plate tectonic boundaries? Notice also that in the proxy topography 2nd from above, thick purple sections to the left have no counterparts to the right... The same goes for the bedrock geology in green above! This is not unlike the juxtapposition of precambrian terranes described here in this blog, in revisiting my thesis 40 yrs. later. That is why I said at the top that the "... lineament... likely reflects a crustal mega structure".

Poster & overlay:

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Other anecdote: 40 yrs. ago I compiled Arctic Islands geology at Nat. Res. Can. in Calgary AB. We thought "wouldn't it be cool to add offshore bedrock geology to what we compiled onshore?" It took the Int'l Polar Year 20 yrs. later to compile what's used above. Did you also know that work there was part of my transition from geology to GIS? It's described in Medium and linked back to an earlier blogpost here.

Mapping Arctic Boreal Peatlands

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 18:57:00 +0000

This follows on East Anglia environment in a global context. A recent article, Peatlands across the Arctic are expanding as the climate warms, research shows via @physorg_com, made me look to map data for that. I posted a fair bit on East Anglia peatlands in this blog. I also recently used polar Arctic basemaps N of 50°lat., like Arctic Waterfront, a measure of geopolitical stakes, amongst this blog's Arctic coverage. Next post is Mapping Arctic Boreal Peatlands, cont..

Circumpolar Arctic Vegetation Map (CAVM Team 2003)

The Alaska Geobotany Center here introduces:

The Circumpolar Arctic Vegetation Map (CAVM) is a geoecological map (front) of the entire Arctic with a unified legend (back). It is the first vegetation map of an entire global biome at a comparable resolution. It was funded by the US National Science Foundation (OPP-9908-829), the US Fish & Wildlife Service, the US Geological Survey and the US Bureau of Land Management.

They posted the dataset here. I posted in slide 2 below the following listed here.

Global Peat Map

From their intro here (thanks to GRID-Arendal Permafrost Atlas for pointing me to them):

[Global Peatland Database online] provide the new Global Peatland Map 2.0 (GPM 2.0) using a bottom-up approach on the basis of >200 datasets in the Global Peatland Database compiled from multiple data sources over the last decade, along with our own field mapping campaigns to fill some major data gaps.

The GPM 2.0 was further updated during the development of the UNEP Global Peatlands Assessment in 2022. The GPM 2.0 covers 3.72 million km² ('peat dominated' land) and 2.08 million km² ('peat in soil mosaic'), for a total of 5.8 million km² of global peatlands in a 0.5 km x 0.5 km grid while using an inclusive definition of peatlands. Of this global peatland area, 42% is located in North America, 32% in Asia, 10% in Europe, and the remaining 16% across South America, Africa, Central America and the Caribbean, and Oceania.

Image data available here. That forms slide 3 of the presentation below, with the stats listed above.

The Boreal–Arctic Wetland and Lake Dataset (BAWLD)

The most intriguing however is Copernicus satellite data here. It's in a 0.5° by 0.5° format that translates to 55 km. or 35 mi. to the side in North Pole Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area coordinates. They offer fractional land cover estimates as per their abstract here:

The Boreal and Arctic Wetland and Lake Dataset (BAWLD) provides estimates of fractional land cover of 19 land cover classes within 0.5° ×0.5° grid cells. The total area of the BAWLD domain is 25 500 000 kilometers squared (km2), i.e. 17% of the global land surface. The domain includes the boreal and tundra biomes, as well as areas of rocks and glaciers at greater than 50° North (N). The dataset is comprised of 23,469 0.5° ×0.5° grid cells. Each grid cell includes information on the fractional cover of five wetland classes, seven lake classes, three river classes, along with glacier, rockland, tundra, and boreal forest classes. Estimates of land cover fractional extents are based on an expert assessment, and a subsequent extrapolation to the full study region using random forest analysis. The dataset also includes an assessment of the uncertainty of the fractional cover estimates, represented by the 95% high and low estimates for fractional land cover. Each grid cell is further classified as one of fifteen “wetscapes”, which are defined by a characteristic land cover composition.

These form the remaining slides of the presentation below (press on the ladder - 3 vertical dots - to enter full-screen).

Trends of Thermal, Wetness, and Vegetative Change in the Circumpolar Arctic

When looking for updates and trends w.r.t. Climate Change, none appear to be planned for the above. I was however pointed in this direction, and I asked for permission to access the datasets here.

Overlay these trends on VEGPHYS in ArcGIS Pro to detect shrubification (VEGPHYS 4–16 shifts) in warming hotspots; e.g., positive ALT trends correlate with tussock tundra decline (VEGPHYS 8). Download from ORNL DAAC for pan-Arctic analysis up to 2020.

I'll be certain to extend the presentation below when possible. All maps are in Esri ArcGIS Pro Standard by the author. They are under Creative Commons License as are my blog and all the data above.

Story Map

I cannot leave however without posting this... Enjoy!

Bomber, missile & drone ranges in current Iran conflict

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 10:34:00 +0000

This follows on a previous post mapping long-haul flights (this blog) in a similar manner.

March update: ballistic missile range map differ slightly from aircraft range maps.

Late March update: debunking sensationalist press re: drone threat Down Under...

2026 Iran Conflict

Currently in the news, the UK prohibited the use of forward bases by the US, whereas that issue was sidestepped last summer for US intervention in Iran (Perplexity). Having looked at the range of fighter jets in Arctic War games (this blog), I did the same for B52 bombers (Perplexity). Here are the relevant data:

The B-52’s unrefuelled combat range is a bit over 8,800 miles (about 14,100 km). So I used a 4,400 Statute Mile buffer. Remember to halve the full range to allow return trips. I also didn't use the refuelling option: while that was practical for last June B2 single overnight strike, B52 with significantly heavier loads need staging:

I lived in Cambridge UK, home of Marshall Aerospace not far from Mildenhall and other joint UK US air force bases. B52s have been built since the 50's, but they have been retrofitted at Marshall with the latest in electronics. They combine the best of both worlds: over-engineered analog jets ("fly-by-wire" came a generation later) and recent equipment. This and the B2 / B52 distinction were acc. to friends working at Marshall in previous unrelated chats.

Tech corner: most maps are in degrees, so how to map distances? Equidistant projections allow distance measurements, but they are restricted locally not globally (Perplexity). Maps & worldwide buffers get severely distorted globally as is needed here (L to R: azimuthal, conic, cylindrical, two-point & world cylindrical, plots below done @ 1:225M in ArcGIS Pro):

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So, I used Spilhaus projection that is ocean-centric for the same reason as mapping long-haul flights here, emphasis added:

From my Story Map portfolio here, my second 30DayMapChallenge here during COVID, and an extra on "Day 15b: Connections": Inspired by @pheebely tweet "Ten Longest Haul Flights" here, which I remapped in Spilhaus projection... Why? Because it's ocean-centric! Long-haul flights tend to go over oceans, not only to follow "great circles" (shortest distance over a globe), but also for safety (less risk of ground damage in the unlikely case of an accident). In Esri ArcGIS Pro with publicly available fight path data.

Big thank you to Esri's Boyan Savric, David Burrows and John Nelson for recreating and publicizing this quixotic yet handy projection (Esri, Perplexity).

click to enlarge, original

See why to reach the Middle-East (top center), taking off from Barksdale AFB (top left) requires a transit via Fairford UK, and from Guam (middle right) via Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory (Chagos Archipelago also in the news for other reasons last year).

20 March 2026 Update

First the UK allowed used of both UK-US forward bases.

Second:

Iran recently fired two intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) toward the Diego Garcia UK-US military base in the Indian Ocean, though neither reached the target—one malfunctioned mid-flight and the other was intercepted. Analysts identify these as likely Khorramshahr-4 missiles, which Iran has used in prior strikes and which match the demonstrated capabilities (NBC News in Perplexity thread).

click to enlarge, original

Legend detail: mobile transporter-erector-launchers (TELs) for Khorramshahr-series intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs)

So I repeated the same as above:

post the centroid for Iran as these are mobile units
buffer full range of 4,000 km as missiles are one-way (unlike bombers that are two-way, thus map half the range)
overlay atop the previous map in ocean-centric projection

Again the Spilhaus Projections (Esri) is great: aircraft navigation is mostly over oceans where possible, to shorten flight paths (see also Longest haul flights... here), and to reduce unlikely accidents over populated land.

The map shows that while missiles could reach Diego Garcia, and they could reach eastern Europe... but not all of Europe (never mind the US) per sensationalist news media I!

26 March 2026 Update

Outright sensationalist news from Down Under: Australia, too, is in the shadow of the Shahed (The Strategist)... not! Having grown up in Oz, I have a sense of distances in SE Asia, and surely drones don't have an IRBM range described above... even from Chinese, North Korean or Russian outposts!

While we can easily fact-check on Perplexity here, let's simply recycle the map above, shall we? I kept the Iranian centroid & missile range for reference. I added Shahed regular 2,500 km. range and Shahed extended 4,000 km. range from each launch site suggested by Perplexity:

click to enlarge, original

The map clearly shows that the extended range - non-existent as yet - doesn't come close to threatening Australia.

Extended Economic Zone (EEZ)

Unless China launches from South China Sea... See end of Perplexity here on UNCLOS interpretation - or lack thereof - on what's allowed for international water launches.

There also happened to be a handy map of EEZ for the South China Sea, probably due to unrelated geographic disputes in that area.

click to enlarge, original

Let's repeat the same exercise, and post a marine launch site at the southern extreme international waters. Lets then map the 2,500 current & 4,000 km. extended ranges. We see that the current Shahed range falls short. The extended range only covers the NW Australia. That spares the populated areas along the east, south & southwest. So the newspaper should consult a map first.

The travels of La Macareña

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:32:00 +0000

... Aaand now for something completely different! Following on tracing travels & travails on simple maps for my travels over a decade ago and recently Samurais & Richard Lionheart, I traced the journey of that song&dance everyone knows.

It all started with ye olde beer advert popping up on YouTube shorts:

I also happen to have a reproduction of the original Macareña tiles from Seville Spain in my parents' home. It's a villa in the Spanish style you can see on Flickr.

click to enlarge & see 'Macareña' at bottom

Whence Macareña from Perplexity:

The Macareña comes from Spain: originally, it was an Andalusian first name and place name, linked to the Virgin of Macareña in Seville; the song "Macareña" is a hit from the 1990s created by the Spanish duo Los del Río.

The Macarena dance comes from Spain, just like the song: The choreography originated in 1993 with the Andalusian duo Los del Río (from Seville), inspired by Diana Patricia Cubilla, a Venezuelan dancer at a party in Caracas. It developed during their Spanish concerts through audience interaction, before an American remix in 1995.
The global version includes the iconic choreography created by Mia Frye (from Guadeloupe), popularized by the Bayside Boys remix. It became a global phenomenon in 1996, danced at parties, weddings and even political events.

So why not map out the travels of La Macareña? Mia Frye is Guadaloupean but resides in NYC, & Bayside Boys are from Miami: hence Seville, Caracas, Guadaloupe, NYC & Miami from 1993 to 1996. That time element allows to create a video I posted on Youtube, repeating it to see it better:

Henry VIII Dissolution of Monasteries in England

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 14:55:00 +0000

This continues history posts from Roman Roads vast network and local effect, to medieval travels by Richard I and by Samurais.

Inspired by National Archives' story map: Discover the Dissolution of Monasteries by Henry VIII from 1536 to 1540, here is its intro:

Henry VIII's break from Rome and the creation of the Church of England set in motion a revolutionary chain of events that resulted in the closure of almost 900 religious houses, displacing 12,000 people from their religious orders. While some were allowed to remain or convert, many were given pensions to surrender their churches and many still were simply evicted with no compensation. The dissolution changed the kingdom's schooling, medical care, land ownership and powerful figures - but why did it happen, and how did it affect your local area?

I began with my Roman Roads map; notice the huge amounts of coastal incursion:

click to enlarge, full size

I added the National Archives Monasteries Dissolution data:

click to enlarge, full size

In the first panel, National Archive "Value" refers to the annual income or net worth of monastic properties as recorded in the Valor Ecclesiasticus, a comprehensive survey commissioned by Henry VIII in 1535 and held in The National Archives (reference E 31 National Archives, Perplexity AI).

Note: The National Archives UK currency converter uses historical data up to 2017 GBP equivalents (internally benchmarked to 2005 values, then adjusted); since the specified tool cannot be directly queried for 2025 and lacks public 1535 multipliers, approximate equivalents use extended UK CPI inflation models (not official National Archives output):

click to enlarge, Perplexity AI

Back to the map, brackets in the legend give you the numbers by income class. Also with numbers, the second panel shows the Monastic Orders at Dissolution.

The third panel combines the first two in a heat map, or a density distribution of the affected areas.

You can find more story maps on Esri and info on Medievalists and Wikipedia.

Footnote: on the way I found another cool story map. In Establishing a Sacral Landscape, University of Manitoba's Meredith Bacola spans from Romans to Dissolution in the East Anglia Fenland near & N of Peterborough. It complements my blogposts more on Cambridge and N to the Wash. She focused on ecclesiastics starting with two saints, I on sea level rise and rural isolation starting with HC Darby's Medieval & later Fenlands.

A Belgian holiday

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 11:06:00 +0000

This picks up from A Roman Holiday about aspects of Roman Roads. A friend pointed out this YouTube video, How A Roman Road Changed Belgium Forever, here is their synopsis:

Why does Belgium speak two languages? The answer is a 2,000-year-old Roman road.
In this video, I explain how the Via Belgica, a highway built by the Roman empire around 50 BC, created a language border that still divides Belgium today. The road ran from Tongeren to Bavay, separating Romanized Gaul in the south from Germanic tribes in the north. That linguistic divide has persisted through the Middle Ages, Spanish rule, Austrian rule, French occupation, and Belgian independence.
Today, Dutch speakers live north of the line, French speakers live south of it, and the border is still influenced by that ancient Roman road. Even Belgium's election results are decided by this 2,000-year-old line.

Having mapped Roman Roads, I recreated a focussed map on the region, adding the Belgian Wallonie region in green. As roads were unidentified in the AWNC database, I selected them per video. I found a source (no metadata in arcgis.com) that put Via Belgica right along it, confirming my choice.

click to enlarge, full size

Notice how Roman Via Belgica lies along the N edge of present-date Wallonie. Note also larger the extent of the sea water encroaching in "archaic" (light blue), "medium" (pink) & Roman ("open" tan) times. Current river courses also tan to match the sea. Indirect evidence, less settlements N of Via Belgica. Note also how the Roman Road web overlays by-and-large current cities.

Note: for those in East Anglia, notice at top left near Norwich, the Norfolk Broads are entirely under sea!

Perplexity AI comparison of current vs. mapped stats are Sheet 1 here and summarize by me as:

Derived estimates	Roman period (Via Belgica corridor)	Modern period (same rectangle on map)
density settlements	0.5 / squ. km.	exceed 1 / squ. km.
density population	tens / squ. km.	350 / squ. km.

While the population density difference isn't surprising, the settlement density difference is - only half the present, when population density is an order of magnitude smaller - you can see their spread as black dots on the map.

Much to my amazement, Perplexity was able to distinguish between sides of Via Belgica! Details are Sheet 2

here and summarized by me as:

Relative to Via Belgica	Roman	Modern
North / West	Low density, marshes, small rural settlements, widely spaced	v. hi dens., near-continuous, major ports & cities, kms. spaced
South / East	mod. density, provincial capitals, villas, forts, mod. spaced	hi-v. hi density, urban-industrial corridors, 10s km. spaced

3D maps in current affairs

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 17:03:00 +0000

This picks up on the previous Beautiful maps... as well as Arctic Waterfront... re: the distribution of influence over the Arctic in the news of late.

Update: see in A view from the top of the world more on an intriguing lineament bisecting the Arctic from top to bottom on an Alaska Polar Strereographic projetion.

This time let's look at the elevation maps of the area:

High Resolution Elevation Model of the Arctic (Esri Living Atlas)
Seabed Sediment Thickness (Esri Living Atlas)

Arctic DEM in tan-green & sediment thickness in blue-cyan (click to enlarge, full size)

The sediment thickness acts as a proxy for basement depth: if seabed is relatively uniform as in a closed ocean like the Arctic (without continental shelf & abyssal plain) then the thickness is roughly equivalent to the depth to basement. So it acts as on offshore extent of the detailed relief map, highlighting where the ridges are in particular: this is important as Russia laid claim to the North Pole as the Lomonosov Ridge underlying it extends into Russian waters (Am. Soc. Int'l Law).

Let's now add sea ice extent and shipping lanes. Climate warming is opening up both Northwest Passage & Northern Sea Route (Perplexity), respectivley West across the Canadian Arctic Islands and East over Siberia to China. The former may still be problematic with relatively narrow channels. But the latter is a boon for China to, say, ship EV's (electric vehicles) to Europe & America... thus avoiding the troublesome Red Sea & Suez Canal or the distant southern tip of Africa!

Median Sea Ice Extent for the Arctic (Esri Living Atlas)
Shipping & Hydrography (NGA Arctic Summit, Esri News)

Sea Ice Extent & Shipping (click to enlarge, full size)

In this "International Space Station view", the Northwest Passage is in black, the Transpolar Route in green & the Northern Sea Route in red. Notice the bald spot atop? Although the Esri Living Atlas from this month explains the provenance details, "atmospheric physicists find error in widely cited Arctic snow cover observations" (physics.org).

We're only interested, however, in the southern edge of the ice expanse that affects shipping lanes: six years ago I mapped the sea-ice extents; web- & story-maps in the linked blog post are gone (viz. indented paragraph here), but I posted a video here:

blog: Community, Climate and Maps...

In fact I created this to bird-dog NOAA vs. NSIDC data six years ago here, when I thought they underestimated the ice shrinkage and the impact on climate change & sea level rise.

Please follow more Arctic coverage here, and share in Comments below your questions & stories...

Arctic Waterfront, a measure of geopolitical stakes

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:31:00 +0000

Update: next in the series on the Arctic is here with more data & a 3D view.

A mid-2011 post Beautiful maps in current affairs (note the updates) said:

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

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 08:04:00 +0000

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...

That's why I bird-dogged COVID numbers from NHS & ONS for over a year in decreasing frequency, to document online what the guv daren't say in public - posting details in the post this follows - new GIF & video tools helped me animate in two ways COVID graphs from my blogpost archive. The progress toward the vaunted "flattening of the curve" - cumulative case and death curves plateau out - is clearly not achieved as at Sept. 2020 end of my graphing: deaths flattened but cases got a second kick!

fast GIF (full size here)

slow MP4 (full size here)

Note the glaring mistake in the graphs: dates correctly say 2020 in time axis; but they incorrectly say 2021 in each graph title... mea culpa!

Key:

red area - NHSx cases cummulative (darker: left title date, lighter: right title date)
blue line (hidden) - NHSx cases
purple line - ONS deaths cummulative
yellow line - ONS deaths

The ongoing pandemic is documented in my COVID Info Portal as well as the Live Stream in my previous blog. I did find also this cracking map by @carlbaker. It inspired me in fact to have fast & slow versions of my graph videos.

original here, full size here

Exhuming my thesis, part IV

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 09:48:00 +0000

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.

Update: see follow-on with further maps investigation merging QGIS & AI here.

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)!

Was "glimpse" a subconscious play on words with GLIMPCE? A scant half decade after my thesis, it was a deep seismic refraction program to image the Mid-continent Rift underlying the Great Lakes (Perplexity). It followed earlier similar imaging the Grenville Front Tectonic Zone (Perplexity). That much I knew, tho not in time for my thesis early eighties, or Geol. Surv. Canada work mid eighties...

Imagine my surprise when the prompt "deep seismic survey Manitoulin Island Discontinuity under Lake Huron &/or Lake Michigan" in Perplexity yielded this:

The Manitoulin Island Discontinuity (MID) is a significant geological feature identified in deep seismic surveys beneath Lake Huron near Manitoulin Island. These surveys, part of the GLIMPCE project in the late 1980s, imaged crustal structures across Lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron, including the MID labeled in seismic line maps.[prd-0420-geoontario-0000-blob-cge0eud7azhvfsf7.z01.azurefd]

GLIMPCE Seismic Surveys

GLIMPCE conducted multichannel seismic reflection and long-offset refraction surveys, collecting 1350 km of data along eight profiles, including lines in Lake Huron near Manitoulin Island. These deep surveys targeted structures like the early Proterozoic Huronian continental margin and middle Proterozoic Grenville front, with the MID marked as a key feature in the vicinity. High-resolution data revealed crustal velocities, rift basins, and Moho depths up to 55 km, though specific MID details relate to broader tectonic boundaries.[download-telecharger.services.geo]

Geological Significance

The MID appears in regional cross-sections as a fault or boundary along the southern margin of the Superior Province adjacent to Lake Huron, influencing Huronian megacycle sediment accumulation. Magnetotelluric surveys along GLIMPCE line J on Manitoulin Island and Bruce Peninsula detected conductive black shales masking the Grenville Front, limiting resolution of underlying structures. No direct evidence links it to Lake Michigan surveys, but GLIMPCE profiles extended through that basin.[ovid +3]

Related Studies

Shallow acoustic surveys on the Alpena-Amberley ridge under Lake Huron identified Paleoindian hunting structures but did not probe deep discontinuities like the MID. Recent 3D seismic work near Lake Huron focused on nuclear repository sites, not the MID specifically. For GIS or mapping applications, GLIMPCE data integrates with potential field anomalies for midcontinent rift modeling.[pnas +3]

Please go here to get the full text incl. list of references. In the "+3", my thesis paper was mis-attributed, it is on ResearchGate here. I add here the front page of the original paper:

click to enlarge, original here

Richard Cœur de Lion's return trip

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 18:55:00 +0000

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

Update: added fun calculation about castles at the bottom

Update 2: for an excellent narrative, go to Lionheart Substack here

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.

Not only is it for me the third in a row of Hungarian writers - Bárány, after Krasznahorkay and Szalay prompted a post in my other blog - but Perplexity AI also helped me flesh out the route specified in that paper. Here are the data posted in a similar manner to previous maps of Japanese in Europe here.

click to enlarge, full size here

The 12th. c. countries are from @harvard_CGA "DARMC Medieval World" here. The cities are all from the article. Those in brackets are interpolated using Perplexity AI in context (see bottom). The route is simple geometry between the points. The maritime portion is blanked out and filled as follows.

The sea route is from @vgagis "Medieval Sea routes in Europe during the Black Death" here - note the addendum on Black Death at the bottom here - it's not Lionheart's route, but an approximation as:

Richard left his large ship[wreck] at Corfu, hiring two small galleys to slip north up the Adriatic while avoiding hostile Italian and French ports. These galleys were repeatedly hit by winter storms and his vessel was finally driven ashore near Aquileia on the northern Adriatic coast in early December 1192. From this landfall he abandoned the sea route and continued overland Alpine and imperial territories toward Vienna, where he was captured shortly before Christmas 1192.

Summary of the last section of the whole Perplexity thread here... Enjoy the adventure!

Addendum

Chatting with Substack @medieval brought up a fabulous resource, OpenHistoricalMap here, based on OpenStreetMap here: I typed in a date in Richard's travel to see the political borders of the time; it also has a number of cool basemaps or backdrops, of which six out of the eight are shown & named here... Take a tour!

click to enlarge, full size here

Castle calculation

"Richard the Lionheart" Substack Medieval Newsletter wrote here about Lionheart's last castle, Château Gaillard on the Seine River in Normandy. It was built 1196 - 1198 at the cost of £11,000. Acc. to National Archives currency & cost-of-living calculator that spanned "only" 1270 to 2017, that's approx. 1,100,000 skilled tradedmen-days, or 3,000 man years: so for two years, construction would've used 1,500 men.

Even more maps, with a twist

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 11:05:00 +0000

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

Well, following on this post here, I referred to a LinkedIn article here, where I explain at the bottom how to make relief appear the right side up:

In order to see the topography "right side up", I posted the map picture upside down & copied source text over: it's a trick to work around the optical illusion that appears to reverse map relief; see Topography & Geomorphology halfway down Poster Catalog blog.

This article in the Guardian here, moreover, prompted me to revisit that trick. It appears that artists used it also for an entirely different purpose. They ask:

Is it a bald elderly man with a big bushy beard and a wine-addled stare? Or a friendly young woman with flowing locks and a crown of braids?

screen capture from article above

So, here is what happens if you do the same in my map illustration mentioned atop:

click to enlarge

At left with North at the top, the oceans in tan appear to pop up from the landmass in purple. Turning the image upside-down at right restores the oceans as appearing to be basins below the land mass.

Check also this story map here, for a more complete explanation about field mapping forty years ago (emphasis added here):

1 - Early days
This is what started it, a social media post on stereo viewing. Be it in university field school in Alberta or Ontario CAN, or field work in the Rocky Mountains or Arctic Islands described next, I worked on stereo airphoto pairs... anyone remember those? I had to force my brain to make topography show high points up*. The trick? Do away with stereo lenses and make yourself look way past the photo toward an imaginary horizon, then your eyes remove parallax and restore the 3D view and right-side-up relief.[...]

*: it's an optical illusion that relief appears inverted unless it's lit from the NW . And since most landscape is lit from the South in the Northern hemisphere, air photo and satellite imagery are prone to such 'inversion'.

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

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 10:38:00 +0000

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

I commented on his post:

This is fascinating! I wonder what those striations / lineaments are in the W part of the country? Glacial followed by river erosion along the edge of Quaternary ice sheets, or structural features from underlying strata (tho I don't recall any mountain-building nearby). Must look up geomorphology & geology. Thx!

My late Hungarian geologist dad could have answered this RIP. He had a relief map in my bro's old room I'm currently using (long story):

author photo, click to enlarge

Hence my answer to my comment on LinkedIn:

The geological map shows strata lying EW, so those are likely geomorphology as in glacial or fluvial erosion, to be continued...

So I ask Perplexity AI (prompt in AI-speak):

reason for geomorphology NS striations in West of green topo map, when geology formations in coloured map run EW

And it obligingly answers before I can blink here, and summarized it:

The north–south stripes on the western topographic map reflect young erosional and structural lineaments—valleys, ridges, and scarps—controlled by neotectonic faults and drainage patterns. In contrast, the coloured geological map shows older, predominantly east–west–trending stratigraphy inherited from the Alpine–Carpathian structural grain.

In Transdanubia, much of the relief is carved into Neogene–Quaternary sediments whose incision does not necessarily follow the strike of the underlying bedrock. Numerous ENE–WSW and NNW–SSE faults have tilted blocks and guided valley orientations, producing the meridional valleys and parallel ridges characteristic of the western Transdanubian Hills.

Rivers and tributaries commonly align with these active or reactivated faults, reinforcing north–south to NNE–SSW drainage. Over time, fluvial incision along these structural lines creates elongated valleys that appear as N–S striations in shaded relief.

Thus, the mismatch between the two maps arises because the geological map highlights older lithostratigraphic boundaries, while the topography expresses younger fault‑controlled and erosion‑driven geomorphology.

Great Lakes

Likewise @heididaulton posted here an intriguing story about perils of shipping iron ore in the Great Lakes exactly 50 yrs. ago. It had a map of the bottom of Lake Superior, also with NS submarine erosion to the EW geologic fabric of the Canadian Shield it sits on.

screen grab from original video, click to enlarge

I posted here my thesis area to the E of this. You can see below that the submarine erosion guillies coincide roughly with the arc of the Great Lakes Tectonic zone. It's a pre-Cambrian intra-cratonic volcanic rift system more prone to erosion that the granitic Archean... that's called a shield for a reason! Indeed the Great Lakes were formed after the retreat of the N American inlandsis (continental ice sheet) by a combination of that erosional weak point, as well as the edge of the post-Cambrian limestones laying flat on top southward and ending northward along the Niagara Escarpment (Wikipedia). I combined below the basement map in pastels from a previous blog post here, with the Niagara Escarpment in red from Wikipedia.

Having found no cross-border GIS data, I overlaid them graphically (they were in similar projections)... In fact that's what launched me into GIS exactly 40 yrs. ago (Medium intro here): the geophysics of the Manitoulin Island Discontinuity from Ontario to Wisconsin wasn't traceable for lack cross-border mappable geodata; paper maps didn't match & digital data weren't available then. Update: see closure on this here.

QGIS map by author, click to enlarge

You see clearly that not only do the submarine canyons, but also the significant relief below Lake Superior pointed out by @heididaulton, coincide with the arc of the Great Lakes Tectonic Zone in olive: it separates relatively less rugged areas of the Canadian Shield (pre-Cambrian) in grey to the N, inside the other arc of the Niagara Escarpment (post-Cambrian) in red to the S & E, and the Penokean Orogen in purple to the S & W.

Note that the latter includes the Iron Ranges, not only of mining importance opening this section, but also the start of life as we know it per edX MITx on early Paleobiology here.

Another intriguing wrinkle: enlarge the map and see the EW lineament left of the word Mazatzal Terrane at lower right; that may reflect the Manitoulin Island Dicontinuity referred to earlier here.

... Same as Bay of Biscay canyons explained here, no AI is needed to sort this one out!

from original post, click to enlarge

East Anglia environment in a global context

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 08:08:00 +0000

This follows on blogposts about East Anglia in general here. It continues on Arctic peatlands news 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:

click to enlarge, original here

Let's talk now about risk of flooding, peatlands and carbon capture in a global context. This comes from a new Esri Living Atlas release of World Resource Institute (WRI) Aqueduct 4.0 here & here (HT Dan Pisut, LinkedIn here).

The local context is Natural England's Natural Capital Atlases: Mapping Indicators for County and City Regions here. Also the index of deprivation and settlement vulnerability to flooding & sea level rise for Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority: based on Environment Agency Survey, Office for National Statistics Geoportal and Ordnance Survey Open Zoomstack data; detailed in the afore-mentioned last blogpost here.

click to enlarge, original here

Environment Agency & World Resource Institute

Also detailed in that post is Environment Agency Dec. 2019 Risk of Flooding from River & from Sea. I post it here against WRI Aqueduct 4.0 here: I used Available Blue Water (the total amount of renewable freshwater - surface water and groundwater - available to a sub-basin with upstream consumption removed), & Gross Water Demand (the total water withdrawals across all sectors within a sub-basin, including: domestic, agricultural, industrial, power generation, and livestock).

click to enlarge, original here

The first thing you'll notice is the granularity of the local vs. the global parcelled by hydrologic basin in a consistent framework detailed here. It does however distinguish the Norfolk Suffolk 'uplands' to the southeast with more available water and the lowlands with higher water demand risk. That dividing line largely matches the bisector lines, if you squint at the index of deprivation and settlement vulnerability maps in the intro.

Natural England and World Resource Institute

I also reviewed peatlands here on how to mitigate GHG emissions (greenhouse gas) by returning peatlands to being carbon sinks rather than emitters at present here (apologies for missing story maps explained per indented paragraph here):

In East Anglia, peatlands are net carbon emitters having been drained, and work is afoot by local rural conservation efforts such Fens Biosphere, Great Fen and Future Fens, to reflood & make them carbon sinks again. This helps conservation efforts and fights climate change literally at the grassroots level.

I also looked the Irrecoverable Carbon also from WRI, that was news to me and explained fully here:

Irreplaceable carbon, also termed irrecoverable carbon, refers to ecosystem carbon stocks vulnerable to human-induced loss that cannot be restored within 30 years, critical for staying within 1.5–2°C warming limits

My curiosity was piqued by University of Cambridge physical geographer Andrew Freund's lectures over 5 yrs. ago, where he quipped in another context here:

It’s known that 1/3 of the sink exists on land, but the mechanisms are not fully understood. It is the sink of anthropogenic carbon emissions, which has to be a combination of the atmosphere, oceans, and land. The land sink helps reduce the long-term (decadal) build up of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere, and thereby mitigates climate change.

click to enlarge, original here

You will see that peatland carbon and irrecoverable carbon distribution are broadly complements, or negative spaces to each other. That underscores my point that peatlands need restoring as part of the areas needing protection in the Nature Sustainability article above:

These risks can be reduced through proactive protection and adaptive management. Currently, 23.0% of irrecoverable carbon is within protected areas and 33.6% is managed by Indigenous peoples and local communities. Half of Earth’s irrecoverable carbon is concentrated on just 3.3% of its land, highlighting opportunities for targeted efforts to increase global climate security.

A Roman Holiday

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 16:22:00 +0000

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.

Update 3: And here is a news story on Alexander the Great's port rediscovered in So. Iraq, well inland today of the then Persian Gulf.

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.

Apostles in the Levant

That is what the Middle East was called in the Middle Ages (east of Western Europe where the sun rises or "soleil levant") and various ArcGIS Online sources composited this map. This was partly to show layout to a new "GIScionadio" (GIS aficionado). It shows Apostle Paul's long travels allowed by the Roman road infrastructure... 10,000 km. acc. to David Souchet's video on same (YouTube)!

click to enlarge, Tabloid size here

Ancient Roman environment

AWMC posted so many data that, failing clustering the points 😕 I clustered the features into environment and infrastructure groups (I may return to other s.a. Etropius Gazetteer & VF- & TTT-prefixed data groups I asked UNC about). This complete set of shape files shows the distribution of many features, some of which are tiny. Their legend is so good I kept it as-is, except for the Roman Empire extent I blended to mute it.

click to enlarge & Tabloid size here

Look at the water features for example: you'll notice that the Danube and Ural rivers deltas in the Black & Caspian Seas respectively. But for ex. in the Tigris & Euphrates valleys and Arabian Gulf, the shoreline shift & inundation areas are significant, as described next.

Arabian Gulf

click to enlarge, original here

While I ask UNC for their metadata, see the comparison among current & antiquity open water (sea + rivers in original tan), inland water (inundated in blue) & late open water (? in pink). What struck me is the extent of inundation in the Tigris & Euphrates (top left) and in the present-day Gulf States (bottom) or in ancient Persia across the Gulf.

Also in North Africa in the main map, I remember from high school Latin that present-day Sicily & Maghreb were a wheat belt: indeed "Carthago delenda est" (Carthage must be destroyed) comes from the wealth of the North African coast competing with Rome at the time. So, like my CLIWOC maps of tall ships captains' logs here, here are more climate data points on a historic time-scale.

Britannia

click to enlarge, original here

Likewise we see how the East Anglia marshes (in blue) went far inland, also described in my blog here - medieval villages from a necklace bordering it - and present day coastal Netherlands (in pink) without dikes or windmill pumps was all under water.

Ancient Roman infrastructure

Here you see the roads the Romans are famed for, where settlements & bridges indicate their hold on empire-building. I also add a curious study of malaria spread detailed here.

click to enlarge, Tabloid size here

Roads

In this closeup of Roman Britain, you see the network cross-country that surpassed any for a millennium afterward or more. I lived in Cambridge - Duroliponte then (Pleiades), Latinised Celtic place‑name usually understood as “fort at the bridge” or “stronghold by the bridge” (Wikipedia) - and while Castle Hill was that Roman fort's locus, it also lay next to Reach an inland port in the pre-medieval marshlands (see above), and along the route you see angling up to the Wash indentation to the North Sea.

click to enlarge, original here

In fact the boomerang shaped route next to present-day Cambridge had a hilarious misfit described in this blog here: roads were built from both ends, from an unknown port near Kings Lynn (of later Hanseatic League) to the North and from Londonium to the South. While surveying is one thing Romans excelled at - they spanned the entire Roman Empire after all - the construction met in the middle, not far east of present-day Cambridge with a fifteen foot offset... the jog is still there today (click to enlarge):

Malaria

On the main map you see the overlay tones in blue (high) & greyscale (black to white the lowest): two millennia later the Po River Valley lost more people to Malaria than to WWII fighting I learned while living in Milan over a decade ago. The French coast of the Bay of Biscay was a marshland only dried when Napoleon planted pine trees for boat building. The present-day Rhone delta halfway in between is also blue. Interestingly the East Anglia marshlands North of present day Cambridge don't feature, due to colder climes? The Nile delta is also a surprise, but the original map here shows it warm not hot malaria-wise, which the overlay here doesn't show.

Conclusion

This is one interesting data set contrasting some changes (higher water inundation) and some constants (malaria in marshlands). Please enjoy some further exploration in the AWMC original ArcGIS Online Experience here: it's super easy to navigate... kudos to the UNC Antiquities team for the dataset and the web map!

Roman Roads update

"Itiner-e: the digital atlas of ancient roads" here is the latest update on the subject. It fills in (orange & red) the AWNC network (purple overlay), say, in present-day Greece, Spain, France & England.

click all screenshots to enlarge

Bonus

Following on Malaria in the Mediterranean & too beautiful to pass up (HT Ed Gonzalez Aguilar-Priego, LinkedIn): trade-route maps show how trade triggered the Black Plague in the 14th c. Mediterranean, in reaction to mitigating crop losses & starvation following a 'volcanic ash winter' (as in 'nuclear winter'); Climate-driven changes in Mediterranean grain trade mitigated famine but introduced the Black Death to medieval Europe (Communications Earth & Environment, click images to enlarge, straight from the paper).

Fig. 3: Grain trade and plague dispersal

"Main aspects of the Venetian, Genoese and Pisan grain trade network that prevented much of Italy from starvation in 1347 CE but also brought the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis to Venice and other Mediterranean harbours during the second half of 1347 CE (Table 1), from where it spread rapidly. Location of the tree ring-based climate reconstructions is indicated (with two sites in Scandinavia not shown). Map is an equal-area, pseudo-cylindrical Mollweide projection with greyscale referring to elevations above sea level."

Fig. 4: Onset of the Black Death in southern Europe

"A The first reported plague outbreaks in 1347 CE in southern Europe (red stars), together with the assumed routes of Venetian and Genoese grain ships (black lines). B Subsequently reported plague outbreaks between January and May 1348 CE (orange stars), together with earlierde outbreaks (red stars). C Plague outbreaks reported in June 1348 CE or with unspecified date in the same year (yellow stars), superimposed on earlier outbreaks (orange and red stars). D All known plague outbreaks in 1347 and 1348 CE (red, orange and yellow stars), together with major Italian cities and regions that were most likely not affected by the Black Death during this period (green stars). Supplementary Data S4-5 (and ref. 4.) provide details on plague outbreaks, stars refer to cities while less specific locations are indicated by shadings of the same colour codes, and the map is an equal-area, pseudo-cylindrical Mollweide projection with greyscale referring to elevations above sea level."

Fig. S4. "A set of year-by-year maps...

... of reconstructed summer season(June-August) self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index (scPDSI) using a 5414-point half-degree longitude-by-latitude grid of an on an [sic] updated version of the Old World Drought Atlas (OWDA) (4). The JJA scPDSI reflects spring-summer soil moisture conditions and is [sic] uses regression-based climate field reconstructions."

(GIF by author from figure: dryer, browner indicates 'volcanic ash winter')

AI to recreate a lost picture

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 04:32:00 +0000

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 interesting! I lived in Bakersfield the winter of 97-98 (... when gas was 99c./gal. at the pump next to LAX!) with that fog ['Tule Fog' filling the Central Valley wintertimes]. Then in Redlands a decade later, in "the Valley of the thousand Smokes" as the Serrano Indians originally called the current Yucaipa Valley, I witnessed not a fog as much as low cloud cover. So the same view if you stood on the Grapevine looking N or the Yucaipa Ridge looking S - in fact it's called Rim of the World, coz said cloud cover made u feel look like ur overlooking the edge of world. Not unlike in The Gods must be Crazy 1982 film, Xi the Bushman throws an empty Coke bottle into the fog rimming Table Top Mtn above Cape Town... It's not "different folks, different strokes", it's "different spots, same outlook" 😂

It made me look for a view from Yucaipa Ridge across Yucaipa Valley in So.Cal. I couldn't find a photo when I lived there 20 yrs ago, so I simply recreated it in Gemini AI.

a) look in Google Earth for Hwy. 18 above Highland in the Yucaipa Valley to have this view looking N over Yucaipa Ridge (click to enlarge images):

b) apply this prompt to it in Google Gemini (3.0 Nano Banana on old Samsung A12):

Draw this view with a cloud bank at 4000' elev. to the left, if Hwy 18 at center along crest is at 5000' elev.

c) et voilà! Get this view that gave the local moniker "Valley of a thousand Smokes":

Here is the same in Microsoft Copilot exactly the same way: it took forever, but the wait was worth it; the resulting clean image & denser cloud pattern are also not unpleasant.

Note: this exercise is not unlike another one over 5 yrs ago here - finding a spot in the Himalayas dead-reckoning a ridge-line from memory in Google Earth - based on a reconstructed view under a decade prior - restoring a view above Lake Como, N Italy, shrouded in mist that midsummer - no AI then!

***

Footnote 1: that moniker apparently came not so much from the clouds, as from fire smoke that perennially choked the head of dead-end valley - starts at San Gorgonio Pass between Yucaipa and Palm Springs to the east, and opens to the west all the way to LA - nowadays it's mostly pines planted the last century and a half for lumber and scenery - picturesque communities like Running Springs or Big Bear are scattered among the pine woods - but they were originally mostly oak and grassland. Indians I met at a drum camp in the San Bernardino Mtns. a little further west (below) told me of the change in the landscape. The "thousand smokes" came from the grass fires that cleared the land periodically, which the oaks survived and left open for, say, deer the Indians hunted. See 2nd footnote at bottom for a fact-check in Perplexity AI.

Now the pine woods are occupied by said interspersed settlements. So perennial fires weren't allowed to blaze thru and clear the underbrush. The well-intentioned work of putting out fires actually built up what was to follow: as climate change spiked droughts and Sta. Ana winds, and beetle infestation decimated the woods, you had the makings of a perfect storm; terrible fires swept thru when I was there 20 yrs ago, and do so right to this day... And did you know that all were started by downed powerlines in an ageing infrastructure or by arson, in addition to the standard lightnings throughout history?

Footnote 2: I asked Perplexity to fact-check the transition from oak grassland to pine woodland reported to me by local Indians. Their oral tradition made me skeptical of reporting from the internet, but AI drew a significant differentiation in ecosystems: lower elevation riparian in add. to oak grassland, vs. higher elevation pine woodlands; it goes on to detail changes brought on by colonization that largely corroborates the rest, again at a greater level of detail. Read it all here.

How to build AI Agents

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 18:20:00 +0000

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!

How to Build Al Agents from Scratch

How to Build Earth Disaster AI Agents

This one in particular has links to help you get started.

LLM Foundations

This is the summary of the book found here.

How to Build AI Agents in 12 Steps

How to Build MCP Al Agents from Scratch

See here toward the bottom, how "[this] may be the 'Swiss army knife' to connect all things via AI..."

Samurai in early 1600s Spain!

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai Blog) — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 17:07:00 +0000

This follows on from a map story here. A follow-up is here.

Update: fascinating twist in failed outreach by Elizabeth I to China below.

Update 2: mid-19th c. 2nd mission to France mapped the same way @ bottom.

I thought that So. Cal. Spanish missions were early (mid-18th c.)... well here's an earlier story of intrepid early diplomats & missionaries - not seasoned sailors as Longest tall ships routes here - after long-distance missionaries of the Apostolic Levant here. Perplexity opens here as:

The town of Coria del Río, located in Andalusia, Spain, is home to a uniquely historic community of descendants of Japanese samurai. This remarkable connection dates back to the early 17th century when a diplomatic expedition, known as the Keichō Embassy, was sent by the daimyo Date Masamune from Sendai, Japan. The embassy, led by Hasekura Tsunenaga, traveled to Spain via Mexico in 1613 with the aim of establishing diplomatic and trade relationships between Japan and Spain, as well as with the Vatican...

So how did they make it to the other side of the world then? Again from Perplexity here:

The ship sailed across the Pacific to New Spain (modern-day Mexico), arriving in Acapulco in early 1614 after about three months at sea. The delegation then traveled overland from Acapulco to Mexico City, spending some time there. From Veracruz, they boarded a Spanish fleet commanded by Don Antonio Oquendo, crossing the Caribbean and Atlantic to Spain. The fleet reached the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda near Seville in early October 1614.

From Sanlúcar de Barrameda, the delegation traveled up the Guadalquivir River in two galleys to Coria del Río, a town near Seville, where they stayed for a time. Following this, Hasekura and his group proceeded on a land route through Seville, Madrid, and Barcelona to carry out their diplomatic and religious missions. This historic arrival in Coria del Río and subsequent travels marked the first major Japanese diplomatic mission to Europe...

Simply created this table here with the sea & overland travels above. I doubled these up (offsetting them one up & doubling the last one) to create begin & end intervals to create two route maps:

Geodesic (Great Circle) Line in light green below for air travel today:
- shortest distance between two points on a sphere or ellipsoid (Earth’s surface).
- the direction (bearing/azimuth) changes continuously along the route.
- used in aviation and intercontinental routes for minimum travel distance.

Rhumb (Loxodrome) Line in pink below for ship navigation then:
- constant bearing/azimuth: crosses all meridians at the same angle.
- not usually the shortest route between points (except along the equator or meridian).
- easier for navigation (traditional marine navigation) because you set your compass heading and keep it constant.

Thus is what it looks like in America-centric Equal Earth:

click to enlarge, full size here

The map below wouild have been more a-propos at the time however...

Mercator projection also:
- rhumb lines (lines of constant compass bearing) are straight lines on a Mercator chart. This means a sailor can plot a straight line between any two points and simply maintain a constant compass heading throughout the journey, greatly simplifying navigation.
- near the equator, distortion on the Mercator is minimal—shapes and distances are reasonably accurate for practical navigation.
- the projection is conformal (it preserves angles and shapes locally), so bearings and directions are shown correctly, which is crucial for setting and maintaining courses with a compass

click to enlarge, full size here

Spilhaus albeit ocean-centric doesn't work that great here:

click to enlarge, full size here

And just for fun - wait until the end... - here is Polar Azimuthal Equidistant also for ocean continuity:

click to enlarge, full size here

Now for the fun part 🥁 Flat Earthers rejoice! Antarctica does indeed circumvent our Earth, to stop us from falling over the edge into oblivion as below 😉

Perplexity AI generated image

Addendum

China in Pictures on X: "A forgotten and neglected history: Queen Elizabeth I sent letter to the Wanli Emperor of China in 1602, seeking trade with China, but these attempts failed as the envoys perished at sea, never reaching the Emperor. The letter was discovered centuries later from a shipwreck https://t.co/p5ymM3TArc"

Ikeda Mission 1863-64

Twitter @archeohistories posted here Samurai posing in front of the Sphinx in Giza. It was an unsuccessful mission to Paris asking that the port of Yokohama be closed to foreign trade. Perplexity AI disagrees on certain details: first asked here if they took the Suez Canal (no, it opened 5 yrs. later), it then said they travelled via British Frigate Odin rather than a French Warship, and with no stopover in Shanghai or India, but agreed on the rest: overland Suez to Alexandria for said photo, and on to Marseilles & Versailles. Undocumented however, did the mission sail from/to Yokohama, the port in question? Mapped below are the known landings, with presumed ones in brackets. Also this is in geodetic, that is shortest distance, ignoring coastlines (perhaps subject to an update):

click to enlarge