@luigirenna The #geomorphs themselves came from the Starship Geomorphs fan supplement for #Traveller. People took them and ran with them by breaking up the geomorphs into 100x100 or 100x50 blocks (as well as individual symbols).
For those of you that are following the volcanic unrest near the town of Grindavík, it's been a slow decline in activity. I’ve been very focused on work for the past month but making sure I get all the rest I need in between long working days at the Met Office. Lots of #GIS and #mapmaking but less tooting. During this waiting game period, I feel the most interesting measurement to look at is the GNNS station at Svartsengi (SENG). Let's take a look (🧵 1/3)
For the past 2 weeks or so we’ve had an ongoing earthquake swarm very close to the town of Grindavík in the Reykjanes Peninsula. The swarm is very likely caused by an inflating magma body currently at about 5 km depth. The shape of the body is most likely a flat sill expanding and causing earthquakes. These events might lead to an eruption very close to people’s homes and lots of infrastructure.
Just north of the mountain Þorbjörn is a large geothermal power plant. This plant delivers electricity, cold water and hot water for district heating. The layout of a geothermal plant is a bit like a spiderweb with pipelines going all over to wells that deliver steam to the plant’s turbines. To underline the importance of these structures, they have a different color than other buildings. This also included the power transmission line from the power plant.
Needless to say, this is a very stressful situation for everyone. There is a lot of uncertainty and the consequences of a lava eruption damaging the power plant are very serious. If hot water production goes out, all the towns on the Reykjanes peninsula will not get hot water for heating. Delivering information on a map in this situation is a delicate process. Keep the message clear, readable and make the most important things stand out. More info in english: https://en.vedur.is/about-imo/news/a-seismic-swarm-started-north-of-grindavik-last-night
I thought it might be interesting for some of the #gischat members of Mastodon to share some of my everyday map making. A thread with a single map and some info on the data, techniques, tips, and tricks. Let's go!
This map shows a recent #InSAR analysis for a volcanic caldera named Torfajökull. The InSAR signal shows there is surface inflation in the center of the volcanic caldera indicating sub-surface magma movement.
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I usually use discreet symbology/colors for datasets of this type. There are pros and cons for discreet vs. continuous. A choice of color is also very important. I avoid rainbows and try to pick colors that work for people with color vision deficiency. Note that #qgis can simulate these deficiencies. Check out Fabio Crameri’s article on the misuse of colour in science communication: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19160-7
I use masks around my labels a lot. In #qgis you can also have buffers or halos around the text. But with masks you can control what elements of the map are affected by the mask. For example, the names of the lakes will only split the outline of the lake. This is one of those small things in mapmaking that make the map more readable without being noticed at first.
One of the largest SotMs (300-400 attendees) this year will be #SotMEU (@sotmeu) in Antwerp, Belgium on November 10-11. If your company is using #OSM data or is #geospatial#gis or #mapmaking, you should come and sponsor!