Abstracts
The View from Above: Mapping Earth and Worlds Beyond
Angel Abbud-Madrid
From the earliest sketches made from hilltops to today’s high-resolution satellite imagery, humanity has always sought higher vantage points to understand its place in the world and the cosmos. This enduring quest—driven by pursuit of resources, economic, political, scientific, and even spiritual motivations—has radically transformed the way we see our planet and ourselves. Modern remote sensing technologies now allow us to map Earth with extreme precision and extend our cartographic reach to celestial bodies in the Solar System and beyond. This presentation traces the historical and technological milestones of our ascent, describing how the view from above has shaped exploration, resource discovery, and the survival of our species.
Worlds within words: 21st century globemaking
Peter Bellerby
Peter Bellerby set up his company in 2009 after a fruitless search for a globe for his father’s upcoming 80th birthday. He self taught the ancient craft of ‘goring’ a globe; the art of transforming a flat surface, paper, into a perfect sphere. Reviving and refining this process took two years to master with endless challenges, but also many lucky happenings along the way.
Bellerby Globemakers specialises in bespoke cartography, working closely with each customer to capture the world through their eyes. These elements weave between the traditional cartography of the globe, bridging what is seen and unseen. From plotting family heritage and the migration routes of ancestors, to plate tectonics, undersea cables or the stars, his customers are invited to collaborate in the cartographic process, visualising their personal stories on the globe. Through a process of investigation and storytelling with his team of cartographers, every ‘publication’ becomes a unique customer representation, a delicate art of mapping memory and place.
Inventing NASA Space Exploration Technologies for our Blue Planet & Beyond
Ved Chirayath
Is life unique to Earth in the universe? If so, how can we better explore space while preserving and protecting life as we know it? How can space exploration benefit us all and what can it teach us? These are the fundamental questions that drive my work. My research focuses on inventing, developing, and testing next-generation sensing technologies for exploring and studying the natural world and extreme environments that serve as analogs for planetary exploration. My investigations aim to extend our capabilities for understanding and protecting life on Earth as well as aiding in the search for life elsewhere in the universe.
In this talk, I share airborne, spaceborne, and seaborne technologies I am developing that can image the seafloor and animals through waves, map our blue planet at scale, probe extreme environments and other worlds, enable flight on electric fields, and plumb the depths just as astronomical telescopes explore the cosmos.
Space affords humanity a unique vantagepoint to monitor and protect the only known biosphere in the cosmos at a crucial inflection point, as well as a gateway for exploring our celestial backyard and beyond. The search for extraterrestrial life thus far has come up short, but the search for extraoceanic life is just beginning. We have hit the celestial jackpot with the discovery of multiple oceans across the solar system, icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn like Europa and Enceladus, that may harbor salty liquid water oceans bigger than our own. Within their depths, new life and a new perspective of our place in the cosmos may lie in wait.
An Atlas of the Universe in Space, Time, and Spectrum
Juna Kollmeier
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, now in its fifth phase, (SDSS-V) is pioneering panoptic spectroscopy: it is the world's first all-sky, multi-epoch, optical-to-infrared MOS+IFU time-domain spectroscopic survey. It is mapping the sky with multi-object spectroscopy (MOS) at telescopes in both hemispheres (the 2.5-m Sloan Foundation Telescope at Apache Point Observatory and the 100-inch du Pont Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory), where 500 zonal robotic fiber positioners feed light from a wide-field focal plane to an optical (R~ 2,000, 500 fibers) and a near-IR (R~ 22,000, 300 fibers) spectrograph. It is also pioneering ultra wide-field integral field spectroscopy across ~4000~deg^2 enabled by a new dedicated robotic facility (LVM-I) at Las Campanas Observatory, where an IFU with 1801 lenslet-coupled fibers arranged in a 0.5 degree diameter hexagon feeds multiple R~4000 optical spectrographs covering 3600-9800A. SDSS-V's multi-year survey strategy is designed to address the physics of star, black hole and galaxy formation in its 3 mapper programs: the Milky Way Mapper, Black Hole Mapper and the Local Volume Mapper. I will discuss the SDSS-V program and will also discuss how this robotic survey technology opens exciting new windows for audaciously multiplexed surveys. I will argue that we should continue to "map them all" and extract maximum information about the physics of the observable Universe.
Mapping Tomorrow
Markus Kristeya & Gregory C. Staple
Since the 1990’s, TeleGeography, the company, has sought to give shape to the intangible. Where is the internet? How are communications routed? Who are the actors driving its evolution?
The ongoing efforts by TeleGeography to ground-truth this new electronic frontier -- to bridge the virtual and the physical -- has produced an unrivaled body of cartographic work, much of which is now housed at the Rumsey Map Center. These maps document the data flows that shape the information economy; the fiber optic submarine cables that make the global internet possible; the communications hubs and data centers that comprise key work sites for the online world; and the companies whose investments and relationships power the development of future networks.
To date, telecommunication and internet service providers as well as investors and industry analysts, have been the primary audience for TeleGeography’s maps. However, the maps also shed light on some of the larger issues of the day, such as how technologies of connection may have fostered greater political polarization and social isolation. Similarly, as more of the on-line world is mediated by AI, maps that ground-truth the internet’s physical infrastructure may help us maintain greater oversight and a measure of democratic control. For example, the owners of submarine telecom cables require country-by-country landing licenses at the shoreline, and conditions — regarding national security, privacy and compliance with local laws such as competition policy, the protection of copyrighted materials, the disclosure of AI training data, etc.– might be written into those licenses.
In short, as the world becomes ever more network-based, maps of telegeography can show us where we are going and point out potential opportunities and hazards along the way.
Illuminating the Deep: How Marie Tharp’s pioneering maps revealed the ocean floor
Betsy Mason
By the mid 20th century, humans had explored much of the globe’s most extreme topography, including both poles and the world’s tallest mountains. But we had yet to glimpse the planet’s greatest unexplored territory of all: the ocean floor. The three-quarters of Earth’s surface buried beneath the oceans was thought to be a featureless plain, until geologists Marie Tharp and Bruce Heezen embarked on a mapping project that would reveal the true nature of the subsea terrain and help revolutionize our understanding of the Earth. At a time when many American scientists were in revolt against continental drift — the idea that the continents are not fixed in place — Tharp’s groundbreaking cartography helped tilt the scientific view toward acceptance and clear a path for the emerging theory of plate tectonics.
In this talk, I’ll argue that Tharp was uniquely qualified to make the first detailed maps of the seafloor. Because of her gender, certain professional avenues were essentially off-limits. But she took advantage of a few doors cracked open by historical circumstances to gain a set of skills that enabled her to make significant contributions to both science and cartography — precisely because she was overqualified for her position as a draftsperson. Without her, these maps would not exist.
“It was a once-in-a-lifetime, a once-in-the-history-of-the-world opportunity for anyone, but especially for a woman in the 1940s,” Tharp recalled in 1999. “The nature of the times, the state of the science, and events large and small, logical and illogical, combined to make it all happen.”
How Was the Subterranean Made Knowable? Mapping, Trust, and the Limits of Early Modern Vision
Johannes Mattes
Transforming a space defined by darkness, instability, and inaccessibility into a credible object of knowledge posed a fundamental epistemic challenge. This paper investigates how early modern actors tackled the visualization of the subterranean. Focusing on cave maps produced across Europe, Siberia, and the Americas, it examines how cartographic practices—grounded in empirical observation yet shaped by aesthetic codes, symbolic repertoires, and cultural expectations—rendered the invisible both plausible and persuasive. The analysis traces how naturalists, engineers, and collectors negotiated the uncertain status of underground knowledge: between nature and artifice, the seen and the conjectured, the measurable and the imagined. Rather than passive reflections of space, cave maps functioned as active sites of translation and contestation, where practices of surveying, drawing, and description intersected to secure trust and claim authority. In doing so, the paper offers new perspectives on the entangled histories of credibility, spatial imagination, and the visual order of natural knowledge.
Mapping Anthropogenic Weather
Luca Scholz
There was little agreement between weather shooters and academic meteorologists. From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, people fired cannons to dispel or deviate hailstorms from farmed land across Europe. Meteorologists doubted the artillerists’ claims but struggled to disprove them. Both advocates and opponents of weather shooting agreed that maps held the key to solving the question. Comparing the images they created, we are confronted with incommensurable visions of weather. Choices of scale, perspective, and visual variables, as well as the inclusion or omission of atmospheric and terrestrial features could make storms appear as socio-natural hybrids subject to human intervention, or as physical processes that eluded their adversaries both physically and epistemically. The maps produced in this context offer new insight into the history of atmospheric cartography. They also invite us to rethink how we map anthropogenic weather, present, past, and future.
Mapping the Subsurface Processes of Ice Sheets and Icy Moons with Ice Penetrating Radar
Dustin Schroeder
Radio echo sounding is a uniquely powerful geophysical technique for studying the interior of ice sheets, glaciers, and icy planetary bodies. It can provide broad coverage and deep penetration as well as interpretable ice thickness, basal topography, and englacial radio stratigraphy. However, despite the long tradition of glaciological interpretation of radar images, quantitative analyses of radar sounding data are rare and face several technical challenges. These include attenuation uncertainty from unknown ice temperature and chemistry, clutter and losses from surface and volume scattering, and a lack of problem-specific radar theory. However, there is rich, often underexploited, information in modern radar sounding data, which is being collected over terrestrial and planetary ice at an unprecedented rate. The development and application of hypothesis-driven analysis approaches for these data can place observational constraints on the morphologic, hydrologic, geologic, mechanical, thermal, and oceanographic configurations of ice sheets and glaciers. These boundary conditions – and the physical processes which they express and control – are filling a fundamental gap in our ability to understand the evolution of both marine ice sheets and icy moons.
Beyond the Image: Mapping Clouds, Oceans, and Energy from Space
Robert Simmon
Life on our home planet is enabled by a complex, interlocking web of systems. Energy from the sun drives circulation in the atmosphere and ocean at scales varying from the personal to the global, and fuels the plants that sustain the food web. Living organisms modulate the concentration of atmospheric gases that, in turn, govern energy radiated from Earth back into space. Energy from deep within the Earth drives the circulation of tectonic plates, fueling a cycle of continental assembly and disassembly.
Over the past half century, a network of satellites has gathered a comprehensive view of the Earth. They measure properties as diverse as cloud microphysics, trace gases, underground water flow, gravity, and solar energy fluxes. These properties are inherently spatial, and maps made from the data help scientists and citizens alike untangle the system of systems that sustain our biosphere.
In this talk I’ll show a variety of satellite datasets, and demonstrate how blending techniques from cartography and scientific visualization can make elegant and informative maps that help people engage with complex scientific topics.
Seeing the Unseen: An Exploration of Ocean Mapping, Past and Present
Laura Trethewey
For most of human history, the seafloor has been out of sight for good reason. The deep sea is pitch black, devoid of oxygen, and under such incredible high pressure that, without an expensive submersible, it is impossible for humans to visit. Even then, explorers risk life and limb to visit the deep sea and in return they glimpse through a submersible porthole only one small patch of seafloor at a time.
How, then, do hydrographers construct maps of an otherworldly place that forms earth’s largest habitat, covers 50% of the planet’s surface and is increasingly important to society as a carbon sink and a source of food and minerals? In this talk, ocean journalist Laura Trethewey, author of the 2023 book The Deepest Map, displays historical and current seafloor maps while explaining the ongoing debate within the hydrographic community over how to connect humanity with a place that stubbornly refuses to be “seen.”