For Decades, Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside of Switzerland’s Official Maps
They've eluded one of the most rigorous map-making institutions in the world to do so
The first three dimensions — length, height, and depth —are included on all topographical maps.
The "fourth dimension," or time, is also available on the website of the Swiss Federal Office of Topography (Swisstopo).
In the "Journey Through Time," a timeline displays 175 years of the country's cartographic history, advancing in increments of 5-10 years.
Over the course of two minutes, Switzerland is drawn and redrawn with increasing precision: inky shapes take on hard edges, blues and browns appear after the turn of the century, and in 2016 the letters drop their serifs.
Watching a single place evolve over time reveals small histories and granular inconsistencies.
Train stations and airports are built, a gunpowder factory disappears for the length of the Cold War.
But on certain maps, in Switzerland’s more remote regions, there is also, curiously, a spider, a man's face, a naked woman, a hiker, a fish, and a marmot.
These barely-perceptible apparitions aren't mistakes, but rather illustrations hidden by the official cartographers at Swisstopo in defiance of their mandate "to reconstitute reality."
Maps published by Swisstopo undergo a rigorous proofreading process, so to find an illicit drawing means that the cartographer has outsmarted his colleagues.
It also implies that the mapmaker has openly violated his commitment to accuracy, risking professional repercussions on account of an alpine rodent.
No cartographer has been fired over these drawings, but then again, most were only discovered once their author had already left. (Many mapmakers timed the publication of their drawing to coincide with their retirement.)
Over half of the known illustrations have been removed.
The latest, the marmot drawing (top), was discovered by Swisstopo in 2016 and is likely to be eliminated from the next official map of Switzerland by next year.
As the spokesperson for Swisstopo told me, "Creativity has no place on these maps."
Military censors have long transformed nuclear bunkers into nondescript warehouses and routinely pixelate satellite images of sensitive sites.
Many maps also contain intentional errors to trap would-be copyright violators.
The work of recording reality is particularly vulnerable to plagiarism: if a cartographer is suspected of copying another's work, he can simply claim to be duplicating the real world — ideally, the two should be the same.
Mapmakers often rely on fictitious streets, typically no longer than a block, to differentiate their accounts of the truth (Oxygen Street in Edinburgh, for example).
Their entire professional life is spent at the magnification level of a postage stamp.
But there is another, less institutional reason to hide something in a map.
According to Lorenz Hurni, professor of cartography at ETH Zurich, these illustrations are part inside joke, part coping mechanism.
Cartographers are "quite meticulous, really high-precision people," he says.
Their entire professional life is spent at the magnification level of a postage stamp.
To sustain this kind of concentration, Hurni suspects that they eventually "look for something to break out of their daily routine."
The satisfaction of these illustrations comes from their transgressive nature — the labor and secrecy required to conceal one of these visual puns.
And some of them enjoy remarkable longevity.
The naked woman drawing (below),
for example, remained hidden for almost sixty years in the municipality of Egg, in northern Switzerland.
Her relatively understated shape was composed in 1958 from a swath of green countryside and the blue line of a river, her knees bending at the curve in the stream.
She remained unnoticed, reclining peacefully, until 2012.
Several of the other drawings came about considerably later.
In 1980, a Swisstopo cartographer traced a spider (below)
over an arachnid-shaped ice field on the Eiger mountain.
It faded out over the course of the decade, retracting its spindly legs in the intermediary editions.
Around the same time, another cartographer concealed a freshwater fish (below)
in a French nature preserve along the Swiss border.
The fish lived in the blue circumference of a marshy lake until 1989 when, according to Swisstopo, "it disappeared from the surface of the lake, diving to the depths."
It's unclear how these drawings made it past the institute's proofreaders in the first place.
They may have been inserted only after the maps were approved, when cartographers are asked to apply the proofreaders' final edits.
When the maps were once printed as composite layers of different colors, cartographers could have built the drawings from the interplay of different topographical elements (the naked woman, for example, is composed of a blue line over a green-shaded area).
Hurni also speculates that cartographers could have partitioned their illustrations over the corners of four separate map sheets, although no such example has (yet) been found.
Some of these clandestine drawings allude to actual topographical features: near the town of Interlaken, where an outcropping of stones approximates two eyes and a nose, the 1980 edition of the map features an angular cartoon face between the trees. (According to local legend, it’s a monk who was turned to stone as punishment for chasing a young girl off the cliff.)
In the late 1990s, the same cartographer drew a hiker (below)
in the map's margins.
With boots each about the size of a house, the hiker serves a pragmatic purpose.
Like a kind of topographic patch, he covers an area in the Italian Alps where the Swiss apparently lacked the necessary "information and data from the Italian geographical services."
The marmot, the latest illustration, hides in plain sight in the Swiss Alps.
His plump outline was concealed in the delicate relief shading above a glacier, which shielded him from detection for nearly five years.
The mountain's hachures — short, parallel lines that indicate the angle and orientation of a slope — double as his fur. He is mostly indistinguishable from the surrounding rock, except for his face, tail, and paws.
He even fits ecologically: as an animal of the ice age, alpine marmots are comfortable at high altitudes, burrowing into frozen rock for their nine months of hibernation.
In 2016, Hurni revealed his location to the public on behalf of an unnamed source.
There is a degree of winking tolerance for these drawings, which constitute something of an unofficial national tradition: the spokeswoman for Swisstopo referred me to a 1901 fish hidden in a well-known painting of Lake Lucerne at the National Council palace (probably in honor of the palace's April 1st inauguration, which some European countries celebrate by attaching "April Fish" to the backs of shirts).
Nevertheless, the marmot — along with the face and hiker — will likely be "eliminated" from Switzerland's next official map (per a decision from the chief of cartography).
Swiss cartographers have a longstanding reputation for topographical rigor.
A so-called "Seven Years War of Cartography" was even waged in the 1920s over the scale of the national maps, with the Swiss Alpine Club advocating greater topographical detail for its mountaineering members.
Swisstopo is now an industry benchmark for the mountains, from its use of aerial photogrammetry (images taken first by balloons and then small planes) to aerial perspective (that natural haziness that renders distant peaks with less contrast).
In 1988, they were commissioned to draw Mount Everest.
Still, the original drawings were never authorized in the first place.
Perhaps a meticulous reading of next year's Swiss maps may reveal some other nationally-celebrated animals in unfrequented bodies of water or alpine meadows.
As Juerg Gilgen, a current cartographer at Swisstopo, told me "as a matter of fact, the proof-reader is also just a human being prone to failure. And cartographers are also just human beings trying to fool around."
Deaf moths use noise-cancelling "stealth" scales to evade bat biosonar
[A composite image of a moth and a butterfly showing the use of acoustic tomography to create a picture using sound. The color images show the target species whilst the grey scale is the resultant tomographic image. This technique allows measurement of exactly how much sound is being reflected from certain body parts of a specimen.]
Some species of deaf moths can absorb as much as 85% of the incoming sound energy from predatory bats — who use echolocation to detect them.
The findings, published Wednesday in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, reveal the moths, who are unable to hear the ultrasonic calls of bats, have evolved this clever defensive strategy to help them survive.
Bats hunt at night using echolocation.
The technique, which is also known as biological sonar, first evolved around 65 million years ago and enables bats to search for and find prey, putting huge predation pressure on nocturnal insects.
One defense that many nocturnal insects evolved is the ability to hear the ultrasonic calls of bats, which allows them to actively evade approaching bats.
Many moth species, however, cannot hear.
The team of researchers from the University of Bristol wanted to investigate the alternative defenses against bats that some species of deaf moths might have evolved.
[One of the four species used in the present study (Antherina suraka). The thorax scales on this moth can absorb up to 85% of the sound energy produced by an echolocating bat.]
Using scanning electron microscopy, the team from Bristol's School of Biological Sciences discovered that the thorax scales of the moths Antherina suraka and Callosamia promethea looked structurally similar to fibers that are used as noise insulation, so they wanted to explore whether the thorax scales of moths might be acting in some way to absorb the ultrasonic clicks of bats and dampen the echoes returning to the bat, offering the moths a type of acoustic camouflage.
The team found that the scales on the body of a moth absorb as much as 85% of incoming sound energy and that the scales can reduce the distance a bat would be able to detect a moth by almost 25%, potentially offering the moth a significant increase in its survival chances.
[A particularly fluffy moth species (Periphoba arcaei) displaying highly elongated thorax scales which act as a type of acoustic camouflage against bats.]
Dr. Thomas Neil, Research Associate from Bristol's School of Biological Sciences and lead author, said: "We were amazed to see that these extraordinary insects were able to achieve the same levels of sound absorption as commercially available technical sound absorbers, whilst at the same time being much thinner and lighter."
"We are now looking at ways in which we can use these biological systems to inspire new solutions to sound insulating technology and analyzing the scaling on a moth's wing to explore whether it too has sound absorbing properties."
England is famous for its rich archaeology, a result of the island nation's long-standing habitation and record-keeping.
But deep below the Victorian, Georgian, Anglo-Saxon, and Roman strata of Albion, the paleontological record speaks to a time long before any simian stepped foot in the region.
Now, the legacy of the country's extinct protolizards will be commemorated by the Royal Mint, on coins depicting three dinosaurs.
"There's a lot of pressure involved, because this is a big deal," says Paul Barrett, a paleontologist at London’s Natural History Museum and an adviser to the mint on its new coins. "They're producing coins, and these are things that can't just be changed. They're real things, made of metal. You can't just put an eraser to them if something's wrong."
Millions of years before there was such a thing as "England," the site was an archipelago surrounded by a shallow tropical sea — a haven for dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes (mainly large).
In the early 19th century, a bit of paleontological mania consumed the Brits, from Mary Anning on the Dorset coast to Gideon Mantell in Oxfordshire and Sussex.
Mantell's crowning achievements are two of the dinos included in the mint's project, over 150 years after the paleontologist-cum-physician-cum-geologist's death.
The first dinosaurs coined in the U.K. are the first that were found in the British soil: the meat-eating megalosaurus, which thrived in the middle Jurassic period, and a pair of extinct animals that lived 10 million later — the spiky-thumbed iguanodon and the armor-plated hylaeosaurus.
Each coin features paleoart of the dinosaurs — created through extensive conversations among paleontologists, paleoartists, and the mint — plus the names of the people who named each species and images of the original fossils they found.
Iguanodon is well-documented in the fossil record, and hylaeosaurus doesn't offer much room for controversy.
But recent work on megalosaurus suggests that the dinosaur may have actually had feathers.
Barnett and the paleoartist Bob Nicholls decided to give the giant therapod a hint of feathers — enough to split the difference between two schools of thought.
"We brought it up to date by giving it some feathers," says Barrett. "But by the same token, we didn't want to go too far and make it look like some kind of diabolical turkey."
The paleoart on the coins is a marked improvement over what was achievable in the past, Barrett says.
The niche field, which dates back only to the 1980s, has grown apace in the past few decades because "the science moves all the time. If we did this 30 years ago, the dinosaurs would look very different than how they look now."
But — obviously — it can only be as up to date as paleontology itself.
It's a far cry from what early British excavators could think up, especially with a limited understanding of dinosaur anatomy.
Back then, in the 1820s, even the vocabulary to call the creatures "dinosaurs" was lacking.
"Instead of looking like giant lizards or giant crocodiles, [early paleoart] looked like the nightmarish outcome of a one-night stand between an elephant and a lizard," says Barrett.
The coins, now available on the Royal Mint's website, are 50 pence pieces in bronze, silver and gold, with prices ranging from 10 pounds to nearly 1,000.
