maps – Page 6 – Coffee Spoons

Some Possible Shapes a Russian Invasion of Ukraine Could Take

I’ve been trying to figure out how to start several days’ worth of coverage about Ukraine and Russia’s “further invasion”. For those that haven’t followed me here at Coffeespoons for very long, eight long years ago, in addition to covering other media outlets’ work, I did quite a lot of research, designed several pieces trying to explain the last Russian invasion of Ukraine: when Putin seized Crimea (ultimately annexing it) and then supported separatists in the oblasts (provinces/states) of Donetsk and Luhansk. You can see that work on this tag for Ukraine.

Perhaps then it should come as no surprise that in the last several weeks my old Ukraine content about Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the Donbas has suddenly become my most popular content. By far. I figure as the first of likely a number of posts on a new invasion, I would outline some options that seem plausible to me, an armchair general.

At this point, it is now clear that Russia has begun to invade Ukraine once again—although the Russians never left at 2014. In Crimea, Russia exercises de facto jurisdiction having annexed the territory and incorporated it into the Russian Federation. The Donbas, on the other hand, remains under the de facto control of the separatists whilst remaining an integral part of Ukraine.

The Donbas consists of the aforementioned oblasts, Donetsk and Luhansk. Importantly, the separatists only exercise authority over approximately 1/3 of the territory with the Ukrainian government in control of the remainder. The separatists’ area of control, however, does include the region’s two largest cities, the eponymous capitals of the two oblasts. Yesterday, however, President Putin announced he supported the “sovereign” borders of the separatists, which claim the entirety of their oblasts.

You don’t need to stretch to see the impact of that statement. Russian troops will “maintain the peace”, or “piece keep”, as they help the separatists forcibly remove Ukrainian authorities from the remainder of the Donbas. The first question is will Putin go that far? Or could Western sanctions stop Putin from advancing beyond the current Line of Contact that divides the separatists from the Ukrainian government?

I wish. I really wish this is all that happens. Maybe we get lucky and the West’s sanctions keep it here, but I doubt it.

Of course Russia made a number of demands upon Ukraine: Recognise Russian annexation of Crimea, cede control of the Donbas to the separatists, withdraw plans to join NATO, declare neutrality, and demilitarise. Of course the Ukrainians could never accept any of those. So will Putin use a refusal to send the Russian army in to push back the Ukrainians to the borders of Donetsk and Luhansk? Personally, barring some significant ramping up of sanctions when the first T-80 tanks cross the border, I don’t see these as likely. You just don’t need to assemble 190,000 troops and your elite armour and mechanised infantry units to do this.

I wish this were the most likely outcome, but I just don’t see the need for so many troops surrounding Ukraine if this is the ultimate objective.

That leaves of us with the sadly more likely, but worse to worst case scenarios. To the south, along the shores of the Sea of Azov, would Putin seek to create a land bridge to Crimea? In 2014, the separatists advanced as far as Mariupol before being repulsed by Ukrainian government forces. After Crimea’s annexation, Russia built the Crimea Bridge, linking the Crimean city of Kerch to the Russian mainland via a road-rail bridge that crosses the Strait of Kerch. But in a hot war with Ukraine, I wouldn’t at all be surprised to see those bridges as targets of Ukrainian forces. Ukraine’s goal would be to significantly restrict Crimea’s access to reinforcements and resupply. Having an overland route would make it easier for the Russians to keep Crimea and Sevastopol. For the Ukrainians, that would mean the loss of several economically important (and large) Ukrainian cities, notably Mariupol.

This is bad, but in my estimation the least bad of the likely bad options before Putin. It would be messy and costly to occupy several cities of 100k+ people that hate you.

Would Putin move on Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkov? Its population is roughly the same size as that of Philadelphia with 1.5 million people, largely Russian-speaking and split between ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians. The city is located only 20 miles from the Russian border and during the 2014 rebellion, separatists raided and ransacked government offices there, though Ukrainian forces ultimately reasserted control. Holding this oblast or a portion of it would create a new conflict zone, much like the Donbas has been for the last eight years. Those eight years with the world focused on the Donbas allowed Putin to consolidate his hold over Crimea. Could a frozen conflict in the Kharkov region take the world’s eyes off the Donbas and allow Russia to integrate Donetsk and Luhansk into western Russia?

Russia would be forced to try to take and hold a city of 1.5 million people, many of whom would be partisans against it. This is where it starts to get really ugly.

To the north is the more remote possibility of a lightning strike—perhaps in concert with one of the above options—to besiege or even attempt to take the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. Could a siege resemble the utter destruction of Grozny back in 1999 when Putin “handled” the Chechen rebels? One certainly hopes not. But it’s not out of the realm of likelihood. One hopes that Putin is keeping so many troops in Belarus to force the Ukrainians to hold back their best troops from engaging in eastern Ukraine.

This is where the really bad gets downright atrocious in the truest sense of the word.

Finally there is the least likely, a full-out invasion of Ukraine west of the Dnieper River, which bisects the country from north to south similar to the Mississippi in the United States. This type of invasion would likely take many months and occur over multiple phases. And too many variables make it difficult to simply illustrate the geography. But it likely would involve almost all of the above to some degree or another. One could see this being the ultimate goal: utterly crippling if not destroying the Ukrainian state, showing the rest of Russia’s neighbours what happens to states that seek to align with the West and follow the path of liberal democracy. Subjugating Ukraine like it’s (peacefully) doing to Belarus.

Russia has already moved a significant portion of its heavy armour and lead units to the border, away from their forward bases. This means that Russia likely needs to commence operations in the next few days or then rotate them back for rest and resupply. This week is likely critical to Russia’s plans.

And as some housekeeping you may note that I’ve temporarily disabled commenting on new posts. Eight years ago as I started posting about these Ukraine articles, my site was hit by spam comments originating from Russia and Ukraine, unfortunately in sufficient numbers to bring down my site for a number of weeks. I will probably leave commenting disabled for the foreseeable future.

Credit for these pieces is mine.

There Goes the Shore

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its 2022 report, Sea Level Rise Technical Report, that details projected changes to sea level over the next 30 years. Spoiler alert: it’s not good news for the coasts. In essence the sea level rise we’ve seen over the past 100 years, about a foot on average, we will witness in just thirty years to 2050.

Now I’ve spent a good chunk of my life “down the shore” as we say in the Philadelphia dialect and those shore towns will all have a special place in my life. But that looks more to be like a cherished memory fading into time. I took a screenshot of the Philadelphia region and South Jersey in particular.

Not just the Shore, but also the Beaches

To be fair, that big blob of blue is Delaware Bay. That’s already the inlet to the Atlantic. But the parts that ought to disturb people are just how much blue snakes into New Jersey and Delaware, how much/little space there is between those very small ribbons of land land off the Jersey coast.

You can also see little blue dots. When the user clicks on those, the application presents the user with a small interactive popup that models sea level rise on a representative photograph. In this case, the dot nearest to my heart is that of the Avalon Dunes, with which I’m very familiar. As the sea level rises, more and more of the street behind protected by the dunes disappears.

My only real issue with the application is how long it takes to load and refresh the images every single time you adjust the zoom or change your focus. I had a number of additional screenshots I wanted to take, but frankly the application was taking too long to load the data. That could be down to a million things, true, but it frustrated me nonetheless.

Regardless of my frustration, I do highly recommend you check out the application, especially if you have any connection to the coast.

Credit for the piece goes to NOAA.

Colours for Maps

Today we have an interesting little post, a choropleth map in a BBC article examining the changes occurring in the voting systems throughout the United States. Broadly speaking, we see two trends in the American political system when it comes to voting: make it easier because democracy; make it more restrictive because voter fraud/illegitimacy. The underlying issue, however, is that we have not seen any evidence of widespread or concerted efforts of voter fraud or problems with elections.

Think mail-in ballots are problematic? They’ve been used for decades without issues in many states. That doesn’t mean a new state could screw up the implementation of mail-in voting, but it’s a proven safe and valid system for elections.

Think that were issues of fraudulent voters? We had something like sixty cases brought before the courts and I believe in only one or two instances were the issues even remotely proven. The article cites some Associated Press (AP) reporting that identified only 500 cases of fraudulent votes. Out of over 14 million votes cast.

500 out of 14,000,000.

Anyway, the map in the article colours states by whether they have passed expansive or restrictive changes to voting. Naturally there are categories for no changes as well as when some expansive changes and some restrictive changes were both passed.

Normally I would expect to see a third colour for the overlap. Imagine we had red and blue, a blend of those colours like purple would often be a designer’s choice. Here, however, we have a hatched pattern with alternating stripes of orange and blue. You don’t see this done very often, and so I just wanted to highlight it.

I don’t know if this marks a new stylistic design direction by the BBC graphics department. Here I don’t necessarily love the pattern itself, the colours make it difficult to read the text—though the designers outlined said text, so points for that.

But I’ll be curious to see if I, well, see more of this in coming weeks and months.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

Regal Birthplaces

Earlier this week marked the 70th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s accession to the throne of the United Kingdom and many Commonwealth realms. There are many graphics about the length of her reign and the numerous prime ministers and presidents she has met over the years. But I actually enjoyed this article from the BBC as it dovetails nicely with my interest in genealogy, which frequently looks at the same sort of materials.

In genealogy we often want to find photos, illustrations, or really any kind of documentation that ties an ancestor to a particular place at a particular time. What I never realised is that the birthplace of Her Majesty, the Queen, no longer exists.

It kind of makes sense, however, when you consider that as the daughter of the younger son she was never expected to take the throne. When her uncle abdicated, however, her father took the throne and then she became next in line and we all know the rest. But because of that lack of expectation her birthplace was just another London townhome. The article details how development changed the location, not the Blitz as is often thought.

You can see from the screenshot above how the article uses a slider device to compare the neighbourhood in London today vs. what it was in 1895, about 30 years before the Queen’s birth.

At this point we’re all familiar with sliders, but they do work really well when it comes to this kind of before-after comparison.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

Dots Beat Bars

Today is just a quick little follow-up to my post from Monday. There I talked about how a Boston Globe piece using three-dimensional columns to show snowfall amounts in last weekend’s blizzard failed to clearly communicate the data. Then I showed a map from the National Weather Service (NWS) that showed the snowfall ranges over an entire area.

Well scrolling through the weather feeds on the Twitter yesterday I saw this graphic from the NWS that comes closer to the Globe‘s original intent, but again offers a far clearer view of the data.

Whilst we miss individual reports being depicted as exact, that is to say the reports are grouped into bins and assigned a colour, we have a much more granular view than we did with the first NWS graphic I shared.

The only comment I have on this graphic is that I would probably drop the terrain element of the map. The dots work well when placed atop the white map, but the lighter blues and yellows fade out of view when placed atop the green.

But overall, this is a much clearer view of the storm’s snowfall.

Credit for the piece goes to the National Weather Service graphics department.

Obfuscating Bars

On Friday, I mentioned in brief that the East Coast was preparing for a storm. One of the cities the storm impacted was Boston and naturally the Boston Globe covered the story. One aspect the paper covered? The snowfall amounts. They did so like this:

This graphic fails to communicate the breadth and literal depth of the snow. We have two big reasons for that and they are both tied to perspective.

First we have a simple one: bars hiding other bars. I live in Greater Centre City, Philadelphia. That means lots of tall buildings. But if I look out my window, the tall buildings nearer me block my view of the buildings behind. That same approach holds true in this graphic. The tall red columns in southeastern Massachusetts block those of eastern and northeastern parts of the state and parts of New Hampshire as well. Even if we can still see the tops of the columns, we cannot see the bases and thus any real meaningful comparison is lost.

Second: distance. Pretty simple here as well, later today go outside. Look at things on your horizon. Note that those things, while perhaps tall such as a tree or a skyscraper, look relatively small compared to those things immediately around you. Same applies here. Bars of the same data, when at opposite ends of the map, will appear sized differently. Below I took the above screenshot and highlighted two observations that differed in only 0.5 inches of snow. But the box I had to draw—a rough proxy for the columns’ actual heights—is 44% larger.

This map probably looks cool to some people with its three-dimensional perspective and bright colours on a dark grey map. But it fails where it matters most: clearly presenting the regional differences in accumulation of snowfall amounts.

Compare the above to this graphic from the Boston office of the National Weather Service (NWS).

No, it does not have the same cool factor. And some of the labelling design could use a bit of work. But the use of a flat, two-dimensional map allows us to more clearly compare the ranges of snowfall and get a truer sense of the geographic patterns in this weekend’s storm. And in doing so, we can see some of the subtleties, for example the red pockets of greater snowfall amounts amid the wider orange band.

Credit for the Globe piece goes to John Hancock.

Credit for the NWS piece goes to the graphics department of NWS Boston.

Finding Home with a Homemade Map

We’re going to start this week out with some good news and for that we turn to China. 30 years ago, child traffickers kidnapped four-year old Li Jingwei from his family and sold him to another family over 1,000 miles away. A BBC article from earlier this month covered Li Jingwei’s reunion with his family. How did it happen? Because of a map he drew and shared with the internet.

Here’s a screenshot of that map.

We all create mental maps of our surroundings. And not surprisingly they grow larger as we get older. But this man’s ability to recall details of his family hometown allowed internet sleuths, and eventually the police, to identify the village. DNA tests then connected Li to a woman whose son had been abducted.

When we draw out these maps ourselves they become a link to the cartographic world. And that this man was able to use his own mental map to find his home. Well, like I said, we’re going to start the news off with some good news.

Credit for the piece goes to Li Jingwei.

Showing All 50

Those who know me know one of my pet peeves are when maps of the United States do not display Alaska and Hawaii. I even noted yesterday that those two states were so late of additions to the United States and it made sense as to why they were not included.

So when I was going through some old photos yesterday, I stumbled across this of a poster on the Philadelphia subway system. I had flagged it for posting, but I guess I never did.

I understand this is an advert and so for creative purposes, creative liberty. And it could be that this service does not exist in either Alaska or Hawaii.

But, the statement here is that Metro covers 99% of the United States. Geographically, to do so Metro must cover Alaska because in terms of land area, Alaska comprises nearly 18% of the entire United States. Yeah, Alaska is big. Now, if you’re talking covering 99% of the people of the United States, Metro has some wiggle room. Combined, both Alaska and Hawaii comprise 0.6% of the United States population. That would still leave 0.4% of the American population not covered, and by definition that must be some part of the contiguous lower 48. But above we can see the whole map is purple.

In other words, this is not an accurate map. They should have found some way of incorporating Alaska and Hawaii.

Credit for the piece goes to Metro’s designer or design agency.

Slaveholders in the Halls of Congress

Taking a break from going through the old articles and things I’ve saved, let’s turn to a an article from the Washington Post published earlier this week. As the title indicates, the Post’s article explores slaveholders in Congress. Many of us know that the vast majority of antebellum presidents at one point or another owned slaves. (Washington and Jefferson being the two most commonly cited in recent years.) But what about the other branches of government?

The article is a fascinating read about the prevalence of slaveholders in the legislative branch. For our purposes it uses a series of bar charts and maps to illustrate its point. Now, the piece isn’t truly interactive as it’s more of the scrolling narrative, but at several points in American history the article pauses to show the number of slaveholders in office during a particular Congress. The screenshot below is from the 1807 Congress.

That year is an interesting choice, not mentioned explicitly in the article, because the United States Constitution prohibited Congress from passing limits on the slave trade prior to 1808. But in 1807 Congress passed a law that banned the slave trade from 1 January 1808, the first day legally permitted by the Constitution.

Almost half of Congress in the early years had, at one point or another, owned slaves.

Graphic-wise, we have a set of bar charts representing the percentage and then a choropleth map showing each state’s number of slaveholders in Congress. As we will see in a moment, the map here is a bit too small to work. Can you really see Delaware, Rhode Island, and (to a lesser extent) New Jersey? Additionally, because of the continuous gradient it can be difficult to distinguish just how many slaveholders were present in each state. I wonder if a series of bins would have been more effective.

The decision to use actual numbers intrigues me as well. Ohio, for example, has few slaveholders in Congress based upon the map. But as a newly organised state, Ohio had only two senators and one congressman. That’s a small actual, but 33% of its congressional delegation.

Overall though, the general pervasiveness of slaveholders warrants the use of a map to show geographic distribution was not limited to just the south.

Later on we have what I think is the best graphic of the article, a box map showing each state’s slaveholders over time.

How the trends changed over time over geography.

Within each state we can see the general trend, including the legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The use of a light background allows white to represent pre-statehood periods for each state. And of course some states, notably Alaska and Hawaii, joined the United States well after this period.

But I also want to address one potential issue with the methodology of the article. One that it does briefly address, albeit tangentially. This data set looks at all people who at one point or another in their life held slaves. First, contextually, in the early years of the republic slavery was not uncommon throughout the world. Though by the aforementioned year of 1807 the institution appeared on its way out in the West. Sadly the cotton gin revolutionised the South’s cotton industry and reinvigorated the economic impetus for slavery. There after slavery boomed. The banning of the slave trade shortly thereafter introduced scarcity into the slave market and then the South’s “peculiar institution” truly took root. That cotton boom may well explain how the initial decline in the prevalence of slaveholders in the first few Congresses reversed itself and then held steady through the early decades of the 19th century.

And that initial decline before a hardening of support for slavery is what I want to address. The data here looks only at people who at one point in their life held slaves. It’s not an accurate representation of current slaveholders in Congress at the time they served. It’s a subtle but important distinction. The most obvious result of this is how after the 1860s the graphics show members of Congress as slaveholders when this was not the case. They had in the past held slaves.

That is not to say that some of those members were reluctant and, in all likelihood, would have preferred to have kept their slaves. And therefore those numbers are important to understand. But it undermines the count of people who eventually came to realise the error of their ways. The article addresses this briefly, recounting several anecdotes of people who later in life became abolitionists. I wonder though whether these people should count in this graphic as—so far as we can tell—their personal views changed so substantially to be hardened against slavery.

I would be very curious to see these charts remade with a data set that accounts for contemporary ownership of slaves represented in Congress.

Regardless of the methodology issue, this is still a fascinating and important read.

Credit for the piece goes to Adrian Blanco, Leo Dominguez, and Julie Zuazmer Weil.

There’s Water in the Basement

If you didn’t know, climate change is real and it threatens much of our current way of life. I don’t go so far as to say it threatens the extinction of mankind, because there are nearly seven billion of us and to wipe out every living soul would be a tall order. But, it could wipe out parts of our history.

If you didn’t know, the city of Washington in the District of Columbia was built on a swamp. Except, actually, it wasn’t. Most of the city was built on higher ground along the riverbank of the Potomac. True, there are low-lying areas affected by the tides and high water, such as the National Mall, but places like the Capitol were purposefully placed on high ground.

And that gets us to this article in the Washington Post. It takes a look at the impact of rising waters and flash flooding on the National Mall, home to some of the preeminent American museums. The article uses a map to show just how the museums are threatened by extreme weather events that will only increase in frequency as climate change ramps up.

Note the Capitol and the White House will both be fine.

The designer used colour to denote museums by their risk of flooding, and sadly there are several. But as the article describes, there are few short-term fixes that we can undertake to mitigate the risk of damage to the collections.

Credit for the piece goes to Taylor Johnston.