Latest news with #elevation
Associated Press
6 days ago
- Business
- Associated Press
Raven Maps & Images Releases New Map Art Series, Peakscapes
With the addition of the new Peakscapes series, Raven Maps & Images has pioneered how people view elevation data. MINNEAPOLIS, MN, UNITED STATES, June 4, 2025 / / -- Raven Maps & Images, an East View Map Link (EVML) brand, strives to provide cutting-edge and innovative maps. With the addition of the new Peakscapes series, Raven Maps & Images has pioneered how people view elevation data. Peakscapes provide a minimalist 'Raven's-eye view' of your favorite mountain views, with five color options to suit your desired palette and mood. Raven Maps & Images is dedicated to preserving its world-class products, artistic feel, and elite-level cartography, all while exploring new frontiers to push creative boundaries. The new Peakscapes series steps away from traditional maps by providing a landscape perspective of various mountain ranges and utilizing aesthetic colors to give viewers a sense of depth. Named peaks and elevation labels showcase the identity of each range. These simplified maps accurately mimic mountain views and are a perfect memento for past or future adventures. 'Peakscapes were born out of a love for mountain landscapes and that innate desire to know the names and elevations of all the summits in view when you come across a dazzling alpine panorama in your travels,' said Chaney Swiney, an East View cartographer and visionary behind Peakscapes. 'These prints focus solely on the mountains, simplifying a landscape down to the bare bones of its topography and showcasing iconic skylines of summits from around the world. Peakscapes are a love letter to the mountains, celebrating the grandeur of these stunning ranges.' The Peakscapes series marks the first addition to the Raven Maps & Images catalog since being acquired by EVML in 2024. Currently the series consists of 31 maps, covering such mountain peaks as Mount Everest, Matterhorn, Mount Fuji, and Mount Rainier. To learn more about all East View brands and services, visit our East View Companies page at Grant Bistram East View Information Services +1 952-252-1201 email us here Visit us on social media: Facebook Legal Disclaimer: EIN Presswire provides this news content 'as is' without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above.
WIRED
21-05-2025
- Science
- WIRED
Trump Cuts Are Killing a Tiny Office That Keeps Measurements of the World Accurate
May 21, 2025 1:00 PM A tiny but crucial agency that maintains physical coordinates like latitude and longitude in the US is struggling as the Trump administration forces out federal employees. Digital elevation model of a urban area. GIS product made after processing aerial pictures taken from a drone. It shows city area with roads, junctions and suburbs. Photograph: Ungrim/Getty Images Cuts made by the Trump administration are threatening the function of a tiny but crucial office within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that maintains the US's framework of spatial information: latitudes, longitudes, vertical measurements like elevation, and even measurements of Earth's gravitational field. Staff losses at the National Geodetic Survey (NGS), the oldest scientific agency in the US, could further cripple its mission and activities, including a long-awaited project to update the accuracy of these measurements, former employees and experts say. As the world turns more and more toward operations that need precise coordinate systems like the ones NGS provides, the science that underpins this office's activities, these experts say, is becoming even more crucial. The work of NGS, says Tim Burch, the executive director of the National Society of Professional Surveyors, 'is kind of like oxygen. You don't know you need it until it's not there.' 'NOAA remains dedicated to providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public and ensure our nation's environmental and economic resilience,' NOAA spokesperson Alison Gillespie told WIRED in an email when asked about the downsizing of NGS. NGS was formed in 1807 by Thomas Jefferson, the son of a surveyor and cartographer. Originally called the Survey of the Coast, the organization, led by a young Swiss immigrant named Ferdinand Hassler, was tasked with mapping the coastlines of the new country. Over the next 200 years, its mission expanded to cover the practice of geodesy: the science of calculating the shape of the Earth, its orientation in space, and its gravitational field. 'Hassler understood that before you put pen to paper and make a chart or a map, if you wanted to [know how] things relate accurately one to another, especially if you're going to do that over a large area like the United States, then you have to have a very strong mathematical foundation to put all these pieces together,' says Dave Doyle, a former chief geodetic surveyor at NGS. 'That is, in a very simple way, what the science of geodesy brings to the nation.' NGS is currently responsible for maintaining and updating what's known as the National Spatial Reference System, a consistent system of physical coordinates used across federal and local governments, the private sector, and academia. This includes not only latitude and longitude, but also measurements of depth and height as well as calculations around Earth's gravitational field—crucial mathematics that inform much of the basic infrastructure around us, from constructing bridges to mapping out water and electric lines. NGS also maintains and operates more than 1,700 federally owned satellite receivers across the US, which provide publicly available geospatial information. While individual surveyors can compare heights and distances in smaller areas, it's far more difficult to compare mountains thousands of miles from each other, or know exactly how sea level rise may be affecting different areas of the country that have vastly different coastlines. Having a coordinated frame of reference across the entire country—both latitude and longitude as well as depth and height—underpins the accurate positioning of locations across the US in relation to each other, as well as in relation to other geospatial measurement systems across the world. The Earth is also constantly shifting: the motion of tectonic plates causes latitude and longitude coordinates to slowly move, mandating that they be updated every few decades. In some places—like the coast of Louisiana, where subsidence is causing between 25 to 35 square feet of land loss each year—these shifts manifest much quicker. 'Most people can stand on the beach and see the water and turn around and look at a dune behind them and go: 'Oh, yeah. That's about 5 or 6 feet above sea level,'' says Doyle. But when it comes to building things, you need to be able to accurately take measurements at scale. 'You have to have some system of heights that is standardized across a large geographic body. I want consistent heights from New York to Maryland so we can build highways, so we can build utility infrastructure. You want to make sure water is always flowing in the appropriate direction.' The US is currently working with a particularly outdated set of coordinate systems. The current measurements contained in the National Spatial Reference System—including latitude, longitude, and vertical heights, a set of reference systems called datums—were established in the 1980s, shortly after the US launched the world's first GPS satellites. In the years since those datums were created, increasingly advanced satellite technology has enabled geodesists to more accurately measure the shape and orientation of the Earth, and to better position their measurements. As a result, each point of measurement in the US datums is now, on average, around two meters off from its actual, accurate location. In some locations, it's even more extreme. As anyone who has tried to go for a run with a glitchy Garmin watch knows, current GPS technology has limits in terms of on-the-ground precision. For everyday navigation, exact locations aren't truly necessary—but for a variety of activities, from mapping floodplains to building bridges to measuring sea level rise, every centimeter becomes crucial. Ensuring hyper-accurate location is also becoming increasingly important as more and more industries are building up around automation that relies on precise spatial measurements. 'Do you want to get in an autonomous taxi that is plus or minus two and a half meters going down the road?' says Burch. 'I don't. That is part of the critical piece here: all these systems have to be this tight and this precise moving forward.' In order to update the US's datums to be in line with satellite data, land shifts, and accurate measurements of the Earth, staff at NGS were planning on rolling out a long-awaited modernization of the National Spatial Reference System, bringing it into the 21st century and making it easier to update moving forward. Originally scheduled to be completed in 2022, the agency posted a notice in the federal register last fall detailing its updated timeline for rolling out the new datums and associated products in 2025 and 2026. But three former staffers who left NGS in the past month say this planned rollout may be pushed even farther behind by staff losses, thanks to employees like them who took retirements, left their jobs, or were laid off as part of federal restructuring. According to former staff, NGS was sitting at 174 employees at the start of the year, with staff looking to fill an additional 15 positions to help with rolling out the new datums and educating federal agencies and local governments on their use. Since January 20, the agency has lost nearly a quarter of its staff and has had to freeze planned hiring. (When asked about the accuracy of these numbers, Gillespie, the NOAA spokesperson, told WIRED that the agency has a 'long-standing practice not to discuss personnel or internal management matters.') The remaining staff are in an 'all hands on deck' situation with the rollout, says Brett Howe, the former geodetic services division chief at NGS, who opted to retire at the end of April. Despite a dedicated staff, Howe says that the loss of many in senior leadership with decades of experience and institutional knowledge means that the agency can't afford to go through any more cuts. 'If we get to hire back some people, we are still going to have trouble meeting that timeline of 2025 and 2026 [for the rollout], but we'll be able to make it work,' he says. 'If there are further cuts, or we're not able to execute our [National Spatial Reference System] modernization plan, and then we get to a year, a year and a half from now, and we lose more people—either through other layoffs or they just retire—then I think we're in real trouble. Then I wonder how we function as an agency.' 'At this time, the ongoing NSRS modernization plans are still aligned with the dates in the Federal Register notice,' Gillespie told WIRED. 'NGS will be releasing foundational data and supporting products for testing and feedback in 2025.' The fate of NGS under the Trump administration is unclear. A NOAA budget proposal from the White House Office of Management and Budget sent to the agency in April cuts the budget for the National Ocean Service, which houses NGS, by more than half. Project 2025 does not mention NGS by name, but it does mandate moving NOAA's surveying capabilities to other agencies. 'We don't speculate about things that may or may not happen in the future,' Gillespie said when asked about potential upcoming changes to the agency. 'NOAA will continue to deliver weather information, forecasts and warnings, and conduct research pursuant to our public safety mission.' The sharp drop in staff numbers at NGS is the tail end of a long decline for the practice of geodesy in the US. In 2022, a group of leading geodesic experts authored a paper on what they dubbed the US's 'geodesy crisis,' detailing how other world powers have invested in training geodesists over the past three decades while the US has wound down funding and training. China has invested particularly heavily in creating more geodesists: the country graduates between 9,000 and 12,500 geodesy students per year, many of whom are then employed by the government. By contrast, around 20 students graduated with advanced degrees in geodesy from US universities over the past decade. This, the authors argue, has contributed to China rapidly overtaking the US in geospatial technologies and disciplines of all kinds. Nowhere is this clearer than with China's satellite navigation system, BeiDou, which has been gaining on the US's GPS system in accuracy. In 2023, a US government advisory board on GPS stated in a memo that GPS is now 'substantially inferior' to BeiDou. Like other cuts to public science made under the Trump administration, the losses from blows to this agency could be substantial. A 2012 analysis found that every taxpayer dollar spent on NGS's coastal mapping program returned $35 in benefits, while a 2019 report found that the NGS program that models gravitational fields would provide between $4.2 and $13.3 billion worth of benefit over 10 years. The private sector also relies heavily on public data provided by NGS. Some analyses project that the geospatial economy will grow to $1 trillion by the end of the decade. It's even more crucial, experts say, to have an updated spatial reference system in the US, as well as institutional knowledge of the basic science of how to measure and understand our Earth. Many industries now 'want that high accuracy positioning' that comes with advanced geospatial technology, Doyle says, 'yet they don't understand the basics of the science. Now you've got all these people punching buttons and getting numbers, and only a tiny percentage of them really understand what the numbers mean, and how one set of numbers relates to another.'
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Mark Armstrong: The fear is real – but so is the excitement
It's all starting to feel uncomfortably close now. Four weeks from Sunday, I'll be standing on the start line in Pietermaritzburg, about to take on the Comrades Marathon. Just saying that makes my stomach flip. It's a scary thought - but perhaps not quite as scary as it was 10 days ago. That's when I decided to take my training up a notch, spurred on by the perhaps unwise decision to properly look at the elevation profile for the so-called 'down run.' I say 'so-called' because I've grown a bit weary of the reactions I get when people ask if I'm doing the up or the down run - and then look mildly disappointed when I say down, as if it's some kind of cop-out. For those unfamiliar with Comrades, the route alternates each year between an 'up' run from Durban to Pietermaritzburg and a 'down' run from Pietermaritzburg to Durban. While the down run might sound easier, it still packs in nearly 4,000ft of ascent - just with more quad-shattering descents along the way. It may be downhill overall, but this is going to be the hardest thing I've ever done from a running perspective. That course profile scared me. Then I thought about how my weekly mileage hadn't yet matched what I'm expecting my body to handle within a single 12-hour stretch. Cue a few 3 a.m. wakeups where I found myself staring at the ceiling thinking, 'why on earth have I signed up to this?' But fear can be a good thing. It was the jolt I needed. Since then, the mileage has ticked up, the hills have become part of the routine (yes, that Trowse hill is getting plenty of attention), and so far, the body is holding up. I've come to realise that this part of the build is all about treading a fine line - learning just enough about the race to inform my training, but not so much that I start overthinking every single detail. At the end of the day, endurance running demands you think on your feet. You have to respond to what your body's telling you in the moment. That's part of the skill. I'm also being realistic. There will be walking - and quite a bit of it. That's part of the strategy, not a sign of failure. With that in mind, I decided to see what my natural walking pace is. So I bribed my kids with ice cream at the local café and walked there while they biked beside me. It was semi-successful - I got a feel for my pace, though I spent most of the time making sure no one cycled into oncoming traffic. Still, it was useful, and got the kids out and away from screens. As I write this, I'm gearing up for my longest run of the training block - and weirdly, I'm looking forward to it. It's reminded me of the way I felt training for my very first marathon in Edinburgh back in 2017. Back then, every long run was an adventure into the unknown. I didn't know how my body would respond. I didn't know if my mind would hold up, but that was part of the magic. That same feeling is creeping in now. There's no guarantee of success. No spreadsheet can predict how I'll feel at kilometre 78. But I'm doing everything I can to prepare. The hard part now is trusting that the work will be enough - and not letting fear write the story for me. How will my mind and body cope over the next month? I've no idea, but I'm strangely excited to find out.
