Photo: Christien Zenino

Climate change is changing the planet. Yes, it’s doing it in all those ways that you already know about: rising seas, rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, more extreme weather. But climate change is changing the planet in another dramatic way, too: It’s actually causing the entire crust of the Earth to shift. According to new research by Jianli Chen and colleagues, climate change–induced glacier melt and sea level rise have thrown the whole planet off-kilter.

The Earth is a ball that floats in space, and the Earth’s surface—the tectonic plates that make up the land—are like a shell that floats on the mantle below. Just like the hard chocolate coating can slip and slide on your soft serve ice cream, the crust of the Earth can slide over the mantle. This is different than continental drift. This is the whole surface of the planet moving as one. The rotation axis of the Earth stays steady, the land masses shift around it. The idea is known as “true polar wander,” and its occurrence is a part of the planet’s history.

The Earth is not a perfect sphere—it’s kind of fat at the middle—and changing how the mass on the surface is distributed changes how the tectonic plates sit in relation to the planet’s rotation axis. By melting Greenland and other glaciers, say the researchers, the Earth’s geographic North Pole has drifted to the east at around 2.4 inches each year since 2005. Nature:

From 1982 to 2005, the pole drifted southeast towards northern Labrador, Canada, at a rate of about 2 milliarcseconds — or roughly 6 centimetres — per year. But in 2005, the pole changed course and began galloping east towards Greenland at a rate of more than 7 milliarcseconds per year.

Seasonal shifts in how ice and water are spread around the world mean that the North Pole is always sort of wandering around. But drift triggered by climate change is new. It’s a sign that global warming isn’t just changing how we might live in the world, but the very face of the world itself.

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Dunwich beach, across which storms pulled the ancient city. Image: modagoo

In 1066, the town of Dunwich began its march into the sea. After storms swept the farmland out for twenty years, the houses and buildings went in 1328. By 1570, nearly a quarter of the town had been swallowed, and in 1919 the All Saints church disappeared over the cliff. Dunwich is often called Britain’s Atlantis, a medieval town accessible only to divers, sitting quietly at the bottom of the ocean off the British Coast.

Now, researchers have created a 3D visualization of Dunwich using acoustic imaging. David Sear, a professor at the University of Southampton, where the work was done, described the process:

Visibility under the water at Dunwich is very poor due to the muddy water. This has limited the exploration of the site. We have now dived on the site using high resolution DIDSON ™ acoustic imaging to examine the ruins on the seabed – a first use of this technology for non-wreck marine archaeology.

DIDSON technology is rather like shining a torch onto the seabed, only using sound instead of light. The data produced helps us to not only see the ruins, but also understand more about how they interact with the tidal currents and sea bed.

Using this technology gives them a good picture of what the town actually looks like. Ars Technica writes:

We can now see where the local churches stood, and crumbling walls pinpoint the ancient town’s remits. A one kilometer (0.6 mile) square stronghold stood in the center of the 1.8km2space (about 0.7 square miles), with what looks like the remains of Blackfriars Friary, three churches, and the Chapel of St Katherine standing within it. The northern region looks like the commercial hub with lots of smaller buildings largely made of wood. It’s thought that the stronghold, as well as its buildings and a possible town hall, may date back to Saxon times.

Professor Sears sees this project as not just one of historical and archaeological importance, but also as a forecast of the fate of seaside cities. “It is a sobering example of the relentless force of nature on our island coastline. It starkly demonstrates how rapidly the coast can change, even when protected by its inhabitants. Global climate change has made coastal erosion a topical issue in the 21st Century, but Dunwich demonstrates that it has happened before. The severe storms of the 13th and 14th Centuries coincided with a period of climate change, turning the warmer medieval climatic optimum into what we call the Little Ice Age.”

So, in a million years, when aliens come to look at our planet, it might look a lot like Dunwich.

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Over the past few decades Lake Urmia in Iran has steadily dried up. Photo: Google / Landsat 

Since 1972, the U.S. has flown a series of satellites known as the Landsat program, a fleet of Earth-observing satellites that were tasked with taking pictures from space. Landsat’s gorgeous photos have been a favorite of the Earth-as-art crowd, and the satellites’ observations have provided an absolutely critical long-term record of how our planet is changing.

The development of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Photo: Landsat / Google

Today, Google put out the Earth Engine, a fascinating tool that showcases a scrollable, zoomable time-lapse of the entire planet as seen by Landsat over the decades. The Landsat photos only go back to 1984, but they show the dramatic ways in which the planet has changed in such a brief period of time. To help you get started, Google pulled out some highlights to look at, such as the drying of the Aral Sea or the deforestation of the Amazon. But the tool does show the whole planet (just the land, not the oceans), and there are many more cool things to be seen.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has a more detailed look at this, the development of the oil sands project in Alberta, Canada. Photo: Landsat / Google

But don’t bother looking for Antarctica, because it’s not included. (Sad.)

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As far as we know H7N9 cannot be passed directly from person to person. But if it could, this map shows how it could spread from the epicenter of the disease in eastern China. Photo: A. J. Tatem, Z. Huang and S. I. Hay / Nature

So far as we know, China’s deadly new strain of bird flu—H7N9, which was so far killed 22 and infected 104, all in China—can’t pass directly from person-to-person. But if it could, says Oxford University’s Jeremy Farrar to Nature, this unnerving, if speculative, map shows how it could spread.

According to the researchers, the map highlights how the area of China where H7N9 is showing up is also a hub for international air travel. “A quarter of the global population outside of China lives within two hours of an airport with a direct flight from the outbreak regions, and 70 percent if a single connecting flight is included,” they explain.

Over the past couple months, this strain of flu has spread from Shanghai, where it was first found, up to Beijing. In the past nine days, nine more deaths have been attributed to the virus. According to the World Health Organization, says CNN, H7N9 is “an unusually dangerous virus for humans.” The pool of people affected has so far remained relatively small. But there is enough unknown about the new bird virus to have scientists worried.

“So will H7N9 prove to be controllable? Will it remain entrenched in animals? Or will it, like the H1N1 virus, stably adapt to humans and cause a pandemic?” asks clinical researcher Peter Horby in an opinion story in Nature. His assessment isn’t exactly reassuring:

“The fine line between foresight and alarmism can only be drawn in retrospect. Nevertheless, my colleagues and I consider that H7N9 has many of the traits that make a new flu virus worrisome.”

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A map of the Mississippi Territory c. 1817. Photo: Library of Congress

Early in the 19th century, the state borders in the southeastern United States were in flux. As the Mississippi Territory began expanding, eventually earning statehood, along with Alabama, the new states encroached on land that had once been part of Georgia and Tennessee. Georgia gave up a bunch of territory to the new states on the block and the border between Georgia and Tennessee firmed up as one tracking the 35th parallel.

In 1818, a survey set to trace the line of the Georgia-Tennessee border missed the mark by a mile, putting the boundary south of where it should have been, says the Georgia General Assembly. They’ve been complaining ever since.

Over the past few years, the dispute has come and gone, and now, says The Atlantic Wire, Georgia has passed a resolution declaring “that it, not its neighbor to the north, controls part of the Tennessee River at Nickajack.” But it’s not Nickajack, a dammed-up lake, that matters.

“Georgia doesn’t want Nickajack,” says the Wire, “It wants that water.”

In the drought-stricken southern states, access to water is a serious issue.

During the summer of 2012, up to 95 percent of the state experienced some level of drought; in December, it hit 99 percent. Last May, nearly a quarter of the state experienced drought that registered as extreme. Despite the state legislature arguing that the drought wasn’t that bad (in an effort to avoid hurting the landscaping industry), it was.

So now, Georgia is digging up old claims to the Tennessee River, an oasis of blue that sits just out of the state’s current reach.

Other times this has come up, like in 2008 when Georgia was again succumbing to drought, not much happened. Tennessee representative Gary Odom in 2008:

“What I thought was a joke has turned out to be rather disturbing,” Rep. Odom said. “I thought it was important that the Tennessee General Assembly declare that we would not engage in any talks with Georgia regarding giving them a piece of Tennessee. That would be absurd.”

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Photo: Sigismund von Dobschütz

Enver Hoxha was as paranoid a dictator as they come. During his forty-year reign over Albania, in addition to generously dishing out death sentences and long prison terms for anyone who opposed him, he organized the building of more than 700,000 bunkers, or one for every four inhabitants in his country. Dubbed the “bunkerisation” program, the shelters were finally abandoned after Communism’s collapse.

The bunkers were never used since the military threat Hoxha imagined never arrived, and their construction drained Albania’s economy and diverted resources away from other, more pressing needs, such as road and housing improvement. On average, there are 24 bunkers for every square kilometer in Albania. Most of these unsightly concrete mushrooms still mar the landscape today, from mountain tops to cities to beaches.

Most bunkers are wasting away into the landscape, but some are used as shelters for animals or the homeless, or as kitschy cafes. Reportedly, their most common use now is sheltering amorous young Albanians looking for some privacy. Wired describes the problem:

Today, Albanian authorities are at a loss for what to do. The reinforced concrete domes are as difficult to repurpose as they are to destroy. Tourists are fascinated by the bunkers strewn like confetti across scenery, but for locals they’re a largely uninteresting, if obstructive, part of the landscape.

Besides being an eyesore, the bunkers really do pose problems for people. Expatica reports:

At least five holidaymakers, including two children and a 25-year-old woman, drowned last summer in whirlpools created by streams around the bunkers which are covered by slime, cracked and damaged by erosion.

In 2009, the government set out to take some action against the bunkers, recruiting old tanks to blow the ugly domes to smithereens.  But things did not go as smoothly as planned—after two weeks only seven had been dealt with. Locals, too, usually fail at attempts to rid their land of the things. Expatica:

Some Albanians have tried to remove them on their own, but their efforts usually end in vain, leaving them resigned to living with the structures they refer to as “mushrooms.”

Some have converted them into sheds, toilets or even “zero-star hotels” for lovers, as they sometimes call the bunkers.

For curious tourists, however, some bunkers now serve as youth hostels. According to the BBC, a couple entrepreneurial students have set out to convert bunkers across the country into unique abodes for travels. If the project manages to be a success, the team said they’ll charge about 8 euros per night for the privilege of sleeping in a genuine Albanian bunker.

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A map showing increasing (blue) and decreasing (red) plant growth over the past 30 years. Photo: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

The further you get from the equator, the greater difference there is between summer and winter temperatures. It’s not just the cold or the heat that makes the most extreme environments so hostile, but this “seasonality” in the temperature—the range of conditions to which plants and animals living in these areas can be subjected. A thick layer of fat and a heavy coat of fur can keep you warm in winter, but the same insulation can be dangerous if the summer heat is too high.

But, with global climate change, says a new study, that temperature seasonality is going down. And satellite records and other observations from the past 30 years, says NASA, show that this change in temperature seasonality is already affecting plant growth in higher latitudes. Higher temperatures and longer growing season mean that large portions of the Arctic, subarctic and temperate ecosystems are seeing more plant growth than they did in the past.

In practice, that means the Arctic is turning green. NASA:

The Arctic’s greenness is visible on the ground as an increasing abundance of tall shrubs and trees in locations all over the circumpolar Arctic. Greening in the adjacent boreal areas is more pronounced in Eurasia than in North America.

So far, the effect has been only a small shift in vegetation patterns, with plant growth in one location mimicking how it was 30 years ago in a location five degrees latitude to the south. By the end of the century, however, scientists think that the changes will be equivalent to a 20 degree shift. Think Alaska’s capital Juneau, at 58 °North, acting more like Louisville, Kentucky, at 38 °North.

However, rising temperatures aren’t the only thing to take into account, and the other effects of climate change could actually hurt the increasingly lush Arctic.

Researchers note that plant growth in the north may not continue on its current trajectory. The ramifications of an amplified greenhouse effect, such as frequent forest fires, outbreak of pest infestations and summertime droughts, may slow plant growth.

And, if a nice green Arctic sounds like a pleasant consequence of climate change, just try to imagine what a 20 degree shift in climate would do to somewhere further south.

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Arctic Dispatch: Thermokarst and Toolik
The Arctic Is Running Out of Snow Even Faster Than It’s Running Out of Ice

A black and white (left) and color (right) map of Mercury’s surface. Photo: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

In the mid-1970s, the Mariner 10 spacecraft took a few passes by Mercury, snapping photos of the innermost planet. These disco-era images, says Space.com, only actually captured about half of the planet, but until recently, they were the best we’ve had.

Now, drawing on the observations of the Messenger satellite, which has been in orbit around Mercury since 2011, NASA put together the first full map of Mercury’s surface, a stunning vista of craters and smooth lava plains that looks more like the Moon than a planet. Space.com:

We can now say we have imaged every square meter of Mercury’s surface from orbit,” said Messenger principal investigator Sean Solomon of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. “Admittedly, some regions are in permanent shadow, but we’re actually peering into those shadows with our imaging systems.

In this video, which showcases NASA’s new map, the image has been color-coded to represent the different ages and chemical properties of Mercury’s surface, with younger rocks appearing brighter and than older rocks while old lava plains are tan.

The map as seen right now is more than big enough for a new desktop wallpaper, but NASA says that they will be releasing the full version of the map in the next few days. The Messenger satellite observations are so good that just one kilometer of Mercury’s surface is represented by one pixel in the full resolution image.

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Will one of these guys be the next pope? Stay tuned! Photo: Wikimedia Commons

A self-appointed German bishop from the order of Corpus Dei (spoiler alert: it’s not an official order of the Catholic church) made it through Vatican security and infiltrated a meeting of cardinals preparing for the arduous process of choosing a new pope.

Ralph Napierski, the fake bishop in question, has been on the church’s radar for some time, says Time:

“He does not work with any of our institutions in any way,” a spokesman for the Berlin Catholic diocese told the German newspaper Bild Zeitung, according to Spiegel Online. The spokesman said Napierski is “self-aggrandizing,” writes angry letters and preaches about sex.

On Napierski’s website, which feature photographs of him posing as a priest with Church officials and politicians, he claims to be adept in “revealing the ancient hidden spiritual practices.” He is a proponent of “Jesus Yoga” and claims to have invented a system that allows people to control computers with their minds.

While the higher-ups of the Catholic church are unlikely to let a little Jesus Yoga distract them from the historic process of pope-selecting, the official police force of Vatican City, the Corps of Gendarmerie of Vatican City State, has acknowledged a need for tighter security during this week’s meetings:

Following Napierski’s attempted infiltration, the Vatican held discussions on improving their security procedures — which already include sweeping the Sistine Chapel for listening devices.

Monday’s meeting was the first in a series happening at the Vatican this week, during which the 103 cardinals present (out of 115 who are eligible to participate in the process) will mingle, discuss the future of the church and prepare themselves for the official Conclave, at which a new pope will be elected. Vatican officials have been working around the clock to get St. Peter’s Basilica and other important buildings ready for the process:

“It is unlikely we will set a date today,” the Rev. Thomas Rosica told reporters. “For one thing, the chapel is not yet ready.”

Workers have started installing floorboards to protect the chapel’s marble floors as well as the stove to burn the ballots and communicate the election results.

The last Conclave happened in 2005 after the death of Pope John Paul II and lasted for just over 24 hours. 

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In the Entire History of the Catholic Church, Only a Handful of Popes Have Resigned
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Will these cows look good with my outfit? Photo: Wikimedia Commons

That Italian leather handbag you’re sporting might have a more complicated history than you think.

According to environmentalists, deforestation in Brazil (removing trees so the land can be used for other, non-forest purposes) is on the rise, and the fashion houses of Italy are one of the culprits. Brazilian cows, who provide the leather used in products made by Valentino, Ferragamo and other high-end labels, need space on which to roam, graze and conduct important cow business, and ranchers are all too happy to engage in a little tree-burning to make that happen for their charges. The Guardian breaks it down:

A 2009 Greenpeace study proved that ranches were still illegally clearing rainforest and that the leather was going straight into the supply chain of major brands. One hectare of rainforest was lost to ranches every 18 seconds. Following the money as well as the trees, Greenpeace found that the enterprise was underpinned by state-funded banks. While former president Lula made speeches about saving the “lungs of the earth” (the Brazilian Amazon stores 80-120bn tonnes of carbon), the state sponsored its wholesale destruction.

By July 2012, official figures showed deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon to be down by 76% from its high in 2004, but NGOs monitoring the situation report an alarming new upturn. President Dilma Rousseff has recently allowed two reforms to the Forest Code that researchers claim will increase deforestation in Brazil by 47% by 2020. If you’ll excuse the phrase, we are not out of the woods.

On the plus side, some fashion houses are scrambling to avoid getting slapped with an anti-rainforest label, and are attempting to source environmentally clean leather:

A new version of Gucci’s Jackie bag will be unveiled at Paris Fashion Week. There have been many incarnations of this slouchy handbag since its launch in the 50s – named for Jackie Onassis, as it was one of her favourite accessories – and the style was most recently revived in 2009. But this latest version stands apart. Gucci had stopped using Brazilian leather in the wake of the 2009 Greenpeace report, but it now sources supplies for the Jackie bag from a deforestation-free zone.

The bag, which retails at more than $2,000 dollars, comes with its own passport, declaring it deforestation-free.

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Photo: Russian Geographical Society

A team of Russian geographers took winter swimming to an extreme last Friday. In a record-breaking dive, the head of the Russian Geographical Society sunk to the bottom of Lake Labynkyr in Siberia, one of the coldest lakes in the world, RIA Novosti reports, where air temperatures regularly hit minus 50 degrees Celsius. The team hopes to get its name in the Guinness Book of World Records for the stunt.

In addition to breaking records for cold dives, the geographers sought to follow up on mysterious discoveries of past years. Though no one is known to have ever entered the lake before, Labynkyr has been remotely explored with echo-sounders and probes. Sonars revealed unusually large objects in the lake, but scientists could not figure out what they were based on echolocation alone.

Locals in the nearby village of Oymyakon—which has a population of around 500 and is the coldest permanently inhabited settlement in the world—have their own ideas of what those objects could be. An old legend claims that Labynkyr is home to a Loch Ness-like water monster called “the devil” by nearby villagers.

According to the Voice of Russia, the team reported finding jaws and skeletal remains of a large animal with their underwater scanner, though these claims are not yet confirmed.

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Photo: Google Maps

If you were planning a vacation to North Korea last week, a peek into the country via Google Maps would have revealed, well, nothing. Pyongyang, the capital, appeared as a blank stretch of off-white, broken only by the blue tendrils of the Taedong river. Seemingly overnight, however, the country modernized. Now, Google Maps depicts highways, roads and train stops clustering around the capital, while larger roads lead out into the once seemingly unbroken wilderness of the country’s northern stretches.

Google explains how they broke this formerly virgin frontier:

To build this map, a community of citizen cartographers came together in Google Map Maker to make their contributions such as adding road names and points of interest. This effort has been active in Map Maker for a few years and today the new map of North Korea is ready and now available on Google Maps. As a result, the world can access maps of North Korea that offer much more information and detail than before.

We know this map is not perfect — one of the exciting things about maps is that the world is a constantly changing place. We encourage people from around the world to continue helping us improve the quality of these maps for everyone with Google Map Maker. From this point forward, any further approved updates to the North Korean maps in Google Map Maker will also appear on Google Maps.

Taking a more philosophical look at the accomplishment, Google points out that map-making is a crucial step towards helping people understand places they are unfamiliar with. More practically, South Koreans who have family still living in North Korea may legitimately need to know where roads and towns are located.

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By tracking mitochondrial DNA, you can retrace the path followed by your ancestors. Photo: Mirthe Valentijn

Starting this Sunday, two-time Pulitzer prize winning journalist Paul Salopek will walk the path of our ancestors in a seven-year journey around the world. Called “Out of Eden: A Walk Through Time,” the journey will take Salopek along the migratory routes of early humans, from Ethiopia to Patagonia, on the southern tip of South America.

Seeking to understand the march of the early humans from evolution to global dominance, researchers have turned to DNA analyses, particularly of the genetic material found in mitochondria, as a way to trace lineages and, in turn, migratory routes. Guy Gugliotta wrote in 2008 for Smithsonian Magazine:

[I]n broad outline, today’s scientists believe that from their beginnings in Africa, the modern humans went first to Asia between 80,000 and 60,000 years ago. By 45,000 years ago, or possibly earlier, they had settled Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Australia. The moderns entered Europe around 40,000 years ago, probably via two routes: from Turkey along the Danube corridor into eastern Europe, and along the Mediterranean coast. By 35,000 years ago, they were firmly established in most of the Old World. The Neanderthals, forced into mountain strongholds in Croatia, the Iberian Peninsula, the Crimea and elsewhere, would become extinct 25,000 years ago. Finally, around 15,000 years ago, humans crossed from Asia to North America and from there to South America.

Unlike actual early humans, Salopek probably won’t be hunting down meals with a pointed stick or get chased around by lions. Nor will he face the possibility of conflict with other hominid species. The point of this journey isn’t to report on history, though, Salopek told NPR:

“I don’t want this to be misperceived as a journey about the past,” he says. “I’m using the past as a road map. I’m using what scientists are telling us are the closest approximations of how we dispersed out of the mother continent, Africa, about 50,000 to 70,000 years ago.”…

“It’s very much about the present day. It’s about how we’ve changed the world, and how the world is being radically altered in our view by such things as the Internet.”

The migration path Salopek will walk originally took tens of thousands of years for early humans to traverse, with the forerunners of modern human societies splintering off in multiple branches along the way. Salopek’s walk will be shorter. But the quest should provide an interesting lens on the multiple and varied societies that have come to inhabit this little Earth of ours. According to the Knight Foundation, one of the sponsors of the project,

Salopek’s goal is to cover the major global stories of our time —from climate change to conflict, from mass migration to cultural survival — by walking alongside the people who live them: cattle nomads, artists, traders, villagers and scientists. Beginning at the birthplace of humanity in Ethiopia and ending in Patagonia, Argentina, Salopek aims to see how this “slow journalism” reveals hidden pathways that link all of our stories.

That might sound a bit vague, but it’s a purposeful vagueness. “Serendipity is a big part of this project,” Salopek told PBS Newshour.

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Machias Seal Island is home to a population of Atlantic Puffins. Photo: Bill Lynch 

Ten miles off the coast of Maine, Machias Seal Island is one of the last holdouts of the centuries-long process of ironing out the U.S.–Canadian border. A 17th century British land grant underpins the Canadian land claim, arguing the island was a part of the province of Nova Scotia. The establishment of a lighthouse on the island in 1832 by the British serves as the supposed final stake in the Canadian perspective on the debate, says Stephen R. Kelley, the former U.S. ambassador to Canada in an opinion story in The New York Times. From the American perspective, however, the 1783 Treaty of Paris—the document that ended the Revolutionary War between the British and the U.S.—gives the island to America.

Though the island’s home country has never been resolved, the two countries don’t seem to be particularly miffed by the discrepancy. Kelley thinks he knows why: there’s nothing really valuable to drive the contention.

While abundant legal arguments surround Machias Seal Island, natural resources are far less evident. No oil or natural gas has been discovered in the area, nor has it had any strategic significance since it served as a lookout for German U-boats during World War I.

Machias Seal Island lies between the coast of Maine and Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. Photo: Google Earth

Even the lighthouse’s keeper, says the Canadian Press, isn’t too bothered:

For Ralph Eldridge, a Canadian who has been a lightkeeper on the island for the last 16 years, the question of who owns Machias Seal Island is a “non-issue,” something that is never a question from the visitors who travel to the island each summer.

And Eldridge said he doesn’t have to produce his passport to go there.

“But neither does someone from the United States or China or Japan or Spain have to when they come to the island,” he said.

Kelley, the former ambassador, thinks that now, when nothing is really going on to drive the need to settle the dispute, is exactly the right time to work out the question of the island’s nationality.

Plus, ironing out the ownership of Michias Seal Island, the last piece of actual land disputed by the U.S. and Canada, could be a prelude to settling the much more divisive debates going on over maritime boundary claims in the steadily-melting and gas-rich Arctic Ocean.

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Image: Martin Behaim 1492

You’ve probably heard, at this point, about how bad Apple Maps were. We won’t really go into that. But if you think Apple messed up big time, think again. The history of map making is full of far worse blunders.

The Wall Street Journal chronicled some of them. Take Ptolemy’s map from around 194 B.C.:

Ptolemy could not resist filling blanks on his maps with theoretical conceptions, something that plagues exploration to this day. The Indian Ocean was displayed as a large sea surrounded by land, while many of his measurements of longitude (something that was very hard to measure accurately until John Harrison’s timepiece won a famous competition in the 18th century) were way off beam. The biggest miscalculation of all, the longitudinal position of the Far East, would eventually suggest to Columbus that Japan could be reached by sailing West from Europe.

Or the mappae mundi that hung on the walls of Churches in the 11th century:

The maps contained places we seldom see on modern charts these days—Paradise, for instance, and fiery Hell—and the sort of bestiary and mythical imagery one might expect to find in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. We can marvel at the mythical bison-like Bonacon, for example, spreading his acidic bodily waste over Turkey, and the Sciapod, a people whose enormously swollen feet were said to make fine sun-shields.

Then explorers filled in some parts of the map like the Americas. In their new maps, California was an island disconnected from the West Coast of the United States. When sailors tried to sail around California, they failed and were quite confused. But the map didn’t change for years.

And then there are the Mountains of Kong—a mountain range stretching across Africa on maps from the 19th century. The Wall Street Journal writes:

The problem was, he had relied on erroneous reports from harried explorers and his own imagined distant sightings. The Mountains of Kong didn’t actually exist, but like an unreliable Wikipedia entry that appears in a million college essays, the range was reproduced on maps by cartographers who should have known better. It was almost a century before an enterprising Frenchman actually traveled to the site in 1889 and found that there were hardly even any hills there. As late as 1890, the Mountains of Kong still featured in a Rand McNally map of Africa.

Apple Maps might have duplicated the Senkaku Islands or sent you to the wrong Starbucks, but at least it never invented entire mountain ranges.

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