Each week Spatial Source highlights the best that the internet has to offer.
You may have heard that Google Maps have recently updated their imagery for the first time in three years, and while this may seem well overdue, the imagery blows the old stuff off the map (quite literally). Free of clouds, LandSat glitches and with higher contrast and resolution, The Atlantic points out why Google Maps has never looked so good.
With the weekend’s Australian Federal Election yet to determine an outcome, a number of election maps from the Geo Developers Blog proves interesting. Developers at Google’s Sydney offices produced a series of maps in relation to the election and will map the results when it’s ready. The above image suggests a Liberal victory, mind you carefully however, as it is based on mock data.
If you are a Game of Thrones fan, and chances are that of course you are, you might have thought that Season 6 contained some very impressive and almost impossible logistical feats. Chief among them, the hyperspace-speed journey of the Greyjoys siblings to Meereen (shown above). The Verge was not convinced of the possibility of such journeys and more, so they went ahead and mapped them all just for you.
An interesting read from the Taipei Times suggests that an ancient Chinese map could be the crucial evidence in support of China’s reclamation of the hotly contested Spratly Islands. That is, if it hasn’t been altered more recently to support China’s claim in the South China Sea.
2016 marks 100 years since the battle of Somme in France, one of the largest battles of World War I. Using GIS to overlay old maps with new imagery new insights into how the battle played out have now been revealed. The 4DSomme Esri storymap by Queen’s University shows how the battle unfolded and the importance of the surveys and maps that defined it.
