Greenland's ice sheet in full retreat? Most definitely, according to a press release from HarperCollins, eagerly touting the 2011 edition of its Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World. Before anyone could compare old and new versions of the "Canada and Greenland" plate, the firm announced that its cartographers "had to erase 15 per cent of Greenland's once-permanent ice cover". The culprit, of course, was climate change.
Climate scientists reacted quickly. They knew the claim was wrong and feared a further backlash from the "climategate" dust-up of late 2009, when hacked email accounts at the University of East Anglia in Norwich suggested that researchers were cherry-picking data to support dubious theories of global warming. In that case, close scrutiny of the emails indicated that it was the hackers, not the researchers, who were spinning the evidence.
So gun-shy atmospheric scientists and glaciologists were keen to pounce on an obvious cartographic misstatement that might reflect negatively on their efforts.
Journalists eagerly joined the fray and promptly dubbed it "Atlasgate". With all of the evidence on the scientists' side, Collins Geo – the HarperCollins imprint responsible for the atlas – offered a feeble explanation that smacked of finger-pointing. Its double-page reference map had been based on information from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, Collins Geo said. The data centre quickly distanced itself from the project.
Apparently Collins Geo had misinterpreted the data, and this was used to compare the flawed map with an earlier counterpart from 1999 for the press statement that caused all the fuss. The National Snow and Ice Data Center, it became clear, would never have endorsed a 15 per cent shrinkage.
How does this kind of mega-glitch happen? An explanation lies partly in Collins Geo's apparent decision to produce the map in house. If that was the case, the firm might have avoided its embarrassment with the obvious quality-assurance step of sending page proofs to carefully chosen experts. Appropriate scientists seldom decline invitations to serve as reviewers.
Another explanation lies in the inherent persuasiveness of any map with a crisp appearance, a prestigious pedigree and the imprimatur of a large, well-known publishing house – traits that not only confer clout in the cartographic marketplace but invite overconfidence and hubris. Clearly the Times Atlas enjoys the prestige of The Times newspaper as well as a long-standing association with the venerable John Bartholomew cartographic enterprise, a hallowed Edinburgh, UK, firm that HarperCollins acquired in the late 1980s.
It seems likely there was a belief that external review was unnecessary. Moreover, it seems that none of the publisher's marketing mavens compared their provocative God's-eye view with competing treatments on readily accessible scientific websites or Google Earth.
Hubris is not too strong a word to explain HarperCollins's predicament. A press release promising "concrete evidence of how climate change is altering the face of the planet forever" invites critical scrutiny by mainstream climate scientists as well as the self-proclaimed sceptics who are ever eager to pounce on overreaching pronouncements by the former. In Atlasgate, the pro-warming community, which outnumbers naysayers by perhaps 50 to 1, wasted no time in trashing the HarperCollins map. Sceptics never had an opportunity to cast themselves in their preferred role of the cautious challenger resisting a bloated, politically biased scientific establishment.
Small-scale, highly generalised topographic maps like those offering broad-brush coverage of fickle, fragile or seasonally variable features such as shallow inland seas and glaciers are a challenge for map authors striving for timeliness and accuracy. A New York Times blog about Atlasgate acknowledged that coastal ice can be particularly difficult to map on a broad scale because the ice margin is constantly dancing backward and forward. Even so, HarperCollins's claim that "15 per cent of the permanent ice cover… has melted away" can hardly be ascribed to the positional uncertainty of a low-resolution map.
Publishers of world atlases are leery of another capricious phenomenon: the thickets of geopolitical testiness and diplomacy. In the mid-1990s Microsoft Corporation committed a blunder when a new version of its operating system asked users to select a time zone by clicking on a tiny world map that violated India's take on its border with Pakistan. Quickly noticed by India's map police, the discrepancy precipitated a recall of 200,000 copies of Windows 95 – all because eight out of 800,000 pixels were the wrong colour.
Place names can be equally touchy: South Korea strongly prefers "East Sea" to "Sea of Japan", and Iran has lobbied map publishers to hold the line against Saudi Arabia and its neighbours, who are anxious to replace "Persian Gulf" with "Arabian Gulf".
I have had first-hand experience of this cartographic pickiness. As one of three editors of the Perthes World Atlas, also marketed as the Cambridge World Atlas, I recently heard of a complaint that a colour scheme inspired by the Olympic rings perpetuated racist stereotypes. In selecting coloured backgrounds for index maps and lists of countries by continent, our designer had used yellow for Asia, brown for Africa and red for North America, while Europe – with a long history of industrial pollution – was coded green. A small matter, perhaps, but a clear warning that cartographic symbols and place names can be a minefield for unwary mapmakers.
In the Perthes example, five years passed before anyone complained. Would HarperCollins's glacial anomaly have been so widely condemned without the provocative press release? Most certainly not. Even so, map collectors might develop a fondness for the 2011 edition and its famously flawed plate. Like accidentally erroneous stamps and coins, the Atlasgate version offers a unique and intriguing story.
Mark Monmonier, a geographer at Syracuse University, New York, is author of How to Lie with Maps and editor of Cartography in the Twentieth Century, a million-word encyclopedia funded by the US National Science Foundation and due for publication in 2014
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