The Quarantine Atlas

Two years ago, at the beginning of the current pandemic, Bloomberg CityLab asked readers to map their life under quarantine. They displayed many maps, some of which were featured here on a previous blog post. Last week they published over 65 of these maps as The Quarantine Atlas.

While the publisher's page does not show any examples, there are quite a few on this Bloomberg page as well as many other maps not in the atlas. Here are a few that I like.

Tiara Lui - Hong Kong

Nice job showing the commute and pandemic disruptions to the city.

Nabilla Nur Anisah - Depok, West Java, Indonesia 

Many of the maps show floor plans of the residence as that is where people are stuck. I like this one because it contrasts the home life with the three hours of commuting to an office in South Tangerang.

Alfonso Pezzi - London transformed. Everything is delivered home including entertainment and work.

Finally here is one that did not make the atlas but I like all the intersecting geographies; floor plans, the local park, the drive to school, various road trips to nearby cities and then out to Illinois.

Carol Hsuing - Millburn, New Jersey

Secret Map of the Battle of Balikpapan

Seventy years ago the Battle of Balikpapan (July 1-21, 1945) was ongoing. This was the concluding stage of the Borneo campaign that removed the Japanese from the island and one of the last battles of World War II. It was mostly fought by Australian troops, but there were also US troops involved, including my wife's Uncle. He gave me some maps and diagrams from the war, including this remarkably detailed map.

Hopefully by now it is safe to show details of a secret map.

This Dutch topographic map was annotated by the Australian Army Topo Survey. The annotations (in red) show enemy positions, trenches, tunnel entrances, bunkers, landing obstacles and observation towers.

The legend shows the range of details that were annotated

Balikpapan was and still is an important oil producing center. Destroyed oil tanks are X-ed out in red.

Folded into the map was an invasion diagram for Green Beach. His name (Lt. Garfinkle) appears twice - on the second wave and also in the bottom right corner (I'm not sure what that area of the diagram means.)

Green Beach was annotated over the map. I suspect it was only given that name for the purpose of this invasion. There is also mention of a "yellow beach" though it is not shown on the map.

 The area was heavily booby-trapped with mines and submerged logs tied together with wires. Landing craft could only approach after heavy aerial bombardment and mine sweeping. The LVT's mentioned on the diagram are amphibious tanks.

There is a very detailed description of the battle on Digger History, an unofficial history of the Australian and New Zealand Armed Services. Most of the places mentioned on the first part of that page can be found on the map so it's been interesting to read it with the map open.

After the beach and highway were secured the troops needed to disable antiaircraft positions and capture the nearby ridge so that Japanese snipers would no longer have a high place to shoot from. Hill 87 at the bottom of the ridge was a fortress of trenches and tunnels.

When this area was finally secured, they moved on to capture Newcastle (Hill 99 on the right edge of the map below.) This high area overlooks the town and harbor of Balikpapan and was a good location to launch an attack on the town. 

I did not get a chance to talk to my Uncle-in-law about his role in this battle while he was still alive so unfortunately all I know is from his placements on the diagram.

Beeswax Maps

Ren Ri is a Chinese artist and beekeeper. He uses beeswax as an artistic medium, creating sculptures and maps.

Above is "Indo-Malay Islands" from his "Geometric Series." Maps and other artworks were recently displayed in the PearlLam Galleries in Hong Kong. These images were taken from the exhibit's catalogue.
 "Korean Peninsula"

 "Mongolia"

 "Argentina" and "Scandinavian Peninsula"

"South Pole"

 

 "World"

Election Maps Elsewhere

Those of us in the USA will be seeing many election maps over the next few days. In the interest of not being every other site, here are some maps of other important elections that have happened this year in large countries that we (myself included) pay much less attention to than we should.

Brazil

In last month's election, incumbent president Dilma Rousseff won both rounds. The map above shows her vote in the runoff election in red and challenger Aecio Neves in blue. On the right is a cartogram - areas proportional to population. Usually cartograms do a better job of showing results but in this case it's actually more difficult to see that she won than the conventional map. I suspect it's due to the strength of support Rousseff saw in the areas she won.

This map uses a gray neutral color instead of the purple we often see in our red-blue maps. This makes for a clearer distinction of areas. Author Diogro Melo does a nice job listing his sources, even for the colors.  He also has a link to the code used to create the cartogram.

India

India had a major parliamentary election in the spring and the BJP with it's allies (the National Democratic Alliance) won a major victory over the Congress party and their allies. A huge number of parties in India would normally make for a colorful map, but in this case it is mostly BJP orange. Congress allies are shown in shades of blue. A cartogram would have shown much more blue with many of the small blue areas being large cities - more colorful, yet uglier as cartograms tend to be.

Indonesia

The world's fourth most populous country had its third presidential election. Twelve parties formed two coalitions with Joko Widodo's coalition winning.

 The red/crimson (what?) color scheme used on Wikipedia is unconventional and barley works. Widodo's winning coalition is red, Subianto and Harvard University are crimson. The geographic pattern is basically Sumatra vs. elsewhere. This map would probably be more interesting with more parties, instead of just the two coalitions. Like, for example, the 2009 Election

Afghanistan

Less populous but also important is Afghanistan. Their election suffered from violence, accusations of fraud and a lack of good maps. Here is the best map I could find.  

Votes for Ashraf Ghani, the declared winner are shown as green proportional circles. Votes for Abdullah Abdullah (the candidate so nice they named him twice) are in purple. The trouble is in making out a pattern underneath the noise of the heavy colors representing ethnicity. A simple dulling of the ethnic colors and/or brightening the circles would help see the relationship between these patterns. Even better would have been to choose colors for the circles that are clearly different from the ethnic colors.

Egypt also had a presidential election. I have not been able to find maps, probably because el-Sisi won 97% of the vote*. I suppose the map would look like this. 

* 97%? A bit above the credibility threshold?
 

Competing Santas

This year you have two ways to follow Santa across the globe. There's the traditional NORAD tracker showing him in Malaysia right now,

or you can go with Google's Santa Tracker. This one has him in Indonesia at the moment.

Are there multiple Santa's or is he just really fast? It depends on your belief system, I guess. Happy Holidays!


 

Map of the Week-Children are Colorful and Beauty

Every couple of years the International Cartographic Association organizes the Barbara Petchenik International World Map Design Competition for children 15 and younger. Entries are archived online by the Carleton University Library in Ottawa, Canada. You can see all kinds of fun maps on this page. Many of them are cliched and similar looking but there's also lots of clever ideas in these young minds.

This entry is entitled "The world is colorful and beauty" and was done by Ferina Tjahyana from the Pelita Harapan Junior High School in Tangerang, Indonesia. She was 13 at the time this map was done (2003).