How does a made up town become a real place? Who has secretly mapped the world’s largest cities? Does the US’s National Weather Service really use Twitter to help decipher anomalous radar signatures? All is revealed here.
The charming culprits behind Denver’s mysterious radar blob
A flock of something 100 km wide caught the attention of the National Weather Service in Denver, Colorado. They took it to Twitter to find the answers.
The lasting magic of drift bottles
Today, oceanographers mostly rely on the latest GPS technology to study how large masses of water travel around the world’s oceans. But it wasn’t so long ago that they relied on a decidedly less efficient, though certainly more romantic, strategy: drift bottles.
An imaginary town becomes real, then not. True story
The fictitious town of Agloe was created by Otto G. Lindberg and his assistant, Ernest Alpers.
This is the story of a totally made-up place that suddenly became real — and then, strangely, undid itself and became a fantasy again. Imagine Pinocchio becoming a real boy and then going back to being a puppet. That’s what happened here — but this is a true story.
What an independent Catalonia would do to the map of Spain
If Catalonia gets its independence, it will be the most dramatic change in Spain’s cartographic persona since the completion of the Reconquista in 1492.
The Soviet military program that secretly mapped the entire world
This Soviet map of lower Manhattan, printed in 1982, details ferry routes, subway stations, and bridges.
During the Cold War, the Soviet military undertook a secret mapping program that’s only recently come to light in the West. Military cartographers created hundreds of thousands of maps and filled them with detailed notes on the terrain and infrastructure of every place on Earth. It was one of the greatest mapping endeavors the world has ever seen.
