Green Mountain Geography
Carto Pioneers
Sorry ESRI
Map Fails
Unhinged Projections
100
Avery’s, Buel’s, and Warren’s are examples of these specific geographic anomalies—wedges of unincorporated land left over from 18th-century surveying errors when Vermont’s original town grids failed to align perfectly.
What are Gores?
100
By plotting instances of disease alongside city water pumps, this physician's 1854 map of London is considered a foundational piece of spatial analysis.
Who is John Snow?
100
This popular Python library extends Pandas data structures to allow spatial operations on geometric types using Shapely under the hood.
What is GeoPandas?
100
It is the most densely populated fictional place in GIS: an imaginary landmass located in the Gulf of Guinea at the exact intersection of the Equator and the Prime Meridian.
What is Null Island (or 0,0)?
100
Invented by a famous architect and systems theorist in 1943, this polyhedral projection maps the Earth onto an icosahedron, unfolding it so that all continents form a single continuous island while heavily fracturing the oceans.
What is the Dymaxion projection (or Fuller or Airocean projection)?
200
While the vast majority of Vermont's watersheds drain into the Connecticut River or Lake Champlain, the Clyde, Barton, and Black rivers drain north into this international body of water.
What is Lake Memphremagog?
200
This ancient Greek scholar was the first to calculate the circumference of the Earth and is credited with coining the word "geography."
Who is Eratosthenes?
200
This open-source hexagonal hierarchical spatial index divides the world into millions of discrete cells across 16 resolution levels, making spatial aggregation blazingly fast.
What is H3?
200
At the time of launch, this tech company's mapping application notoriously directed drivers onto an active airport taxiway in Alaska and placed the Washington Monument across the street from its actual location.
What is Apple (Apple Maps)?
200
Published in 1925 by its namesake American mathematician, and sharing a name with our esteemed leader, this conformal projection forces the globe into a perfect quadrilateral, uniquely placing the North and South poles at diametrically opposite corners.
What is the Adams World in a Square?
300
Highly visible at Lone Rock Point in Burlington, this massive 200-mile geological feature—where older Cambrian rock was violently forced up and over younger Ordovician shale—physically defines the boundary of the Champlain Valley.
What is the Champlain Thrust (or Champlain Thrust Fault)?
300
This cartographer's hand-drafted maps of the ocean floor in the 1950s provided the first visual evidence of the mid-ocean ridges, proving the theory of continental drift.
Who is Marie Tharp?
300
This modern raster format standard allows clients to use HTTP range requests to fetch only the specific spatial window or resolution tier of an image they need, bypassing the need to download the entire multi-gigabyte file.
What is a Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG)?
300
In the 1930s, mapmakers invented this fictional town in upstate New York as a copyright trap, but it accidentally became "real" when someone built a general store there under the same name.
What is Agloe (what is a paper town / phantom settlement are acceptable)
300
Recently repopularized in oceanography, this 1942 projection places Antarctica at the center and drastically distorts the continents to display all the world's oceans as one uninterrupted, continuous body of water.
What is the Spilhaus projection?
400
In 1937, the state legislature took the rare step of formally disincorporating these two adjacent Bennington County towns, reverting them to unorganized status and erasing their local governments after their populations dwindled to almost zero.
What are Glastenbury and Somerset?
400
In 1570, this Flemish cartographer published the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, which is widely recognized as the first true modern atlas.
Who is Abraham Ortelius?
400
This open specification provides a standardized JSON structure for describing, cataloging, and querying spatiotemporal assets like satellite imagery across cloud storage buckets.
What is STAC (SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog)?
400
In 2010, a military commander from this Central American country blamed a wildly inaccurate border on Google Maps as his justification for accidentally invading neighboring Costa Rica.
What is Nicaragua?
400
Developed in 1879 by a famous American philosopher, this mathematically complex conformal projection maps the entire globe onto a square, with the North Pole at the exact center and the Equator forming a tilted diamond shape inside.
What is the Peirce Quincuncial projection?
500
The northern border of Vermont and Canada was intended to perfectly follow this specific line of latitude, but due to a notorious surveying error by John Collins and Thomas Valentine in the 1770s, the actual border meanders up to three-quarters of a mile north of it. What is the 45th Parallel (or 45 degrees North)?
What is the 45th Parallel (or 45 degrees North)?
500
Often called a "father of GIS," this geographer developed the Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS) in the early 1960s.
Who is Roger Tomlinson?
500
This rapidly growing in-process analytical SQL database engine features a spatial extension that allows users to execute lightning-fast spatial queries directly on GeoParquet and CSV files in-memory, entirely eliminating the need for a dedicated PostGIS server.
What is DuckDB?
500
In 2012, Australian scientists officially "undiscovered" this phantom island in the Coral Sea, noting that it had appeared on marine charts, world maps, and Google Earth for over a century despite just being empty ocean.
What is Sandy Island?
500
This azimuthal projection breaks the Southern Hemisphere into five distinct triangular points to minimize distortion. Geographers should recognize it immediately—it serves as the central element in the official logo of the American Association of Geographers (AAG).
What is the Berghaus Star projection?