White Spot Survey

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There is one land that is most likely not touched by human mankind so far – besides of some research stations: Antarctica. Up to 55 countries are operating facilities (find here all locations of all stations) on the only continent, which you literally could call a white spot. But humankind already has built roads on Antarctica (for example, see McMurdo-Station on Ross Island) and therefore Antarctica caught our attention, too.

Premature April’s fool hoax?

No, and to be honest, a different story made us interested: The British Antarctic Survey has published the most detailed map about the landscape of Antarctica beneath the thick ice sheet. It’s called Bedmap3 and was compiled using aerial, satellite, ship- and land-borne surveys to look beneath the ice sheet with the help of radar, seismic and gravimetric measurements. This ice is up to 4,757 meters thick (mean thickness excluding ice shelves is 2,148 meters)!

This measurement reveals the amount of ice that is currently covering and therefore pushing down the landmass of Antarctica. It sums up to 27.17 million cubic kilometers and if all of this melted the sea level would rise by 58 meters! Knowing that helps to improve simulation about what could go wrong due to running climate change and warming in the Antarctica region. With the help of a detailed surface model representing deep valleys and rocky mountains (sticking up through the ice sheet) simulation can be more accurate regarding the flow of the ice and where it might be hindered to flow. For that the elevation model represents 82 million data points, rendered on a 500 meter-wide grid spacing. This is way more detailed than before but still low resolution compared to the WorldDEM Neo, which provides a 5 meter-wide grid. This dataset was created based on the TanDEM-X satellite imagery radar data (which can also show the melting of glacier ice contributing already 18 millimeters to the rise of the global sea levels).

And by the way while we are talking about data from space here (as we already did before), there is new map data about the space, too. Recently, a high-definition map about the baby universe was published – providing an image about the cosmic microwave background radiation that traveled 13 billion years to Earth. This data represents the universe at an age of 380,000 years (currently the universe is already 13.8 billion years old). The new images are five-times as detailed as the previous ones from the Planck mission and give a view of very subtle variations in the density and velocity of the gases that filled the young universe. It shows the size of the universe, which is 50 billion light years in every direction from our point of view! Over the following millions to billions of years, gravity pulled the denser regions of gas inward to build stars and galaxies. This data can help to understand universe’s origins by comparing the “simpler times back in the days” to the complex places we find today into which the universe has evolved itself. And a good map is always a good help to find one’s way.