Here’s why Iceland is one of the most amazing places on Earth: It is the only spot where a mid-ocean ridge can be seen above water. Mid-ocean ridges are the seams that bisect the oceanic plates where magma comes up from the mantle below to form new crust. They are basically continuous lines of major volcanic activity, creating new ocean floor at rates up to 15 cm per year (7.5 on each side). The new crust moves away from the ridges and eventually, millions of years later, is pushed beneath a continent back into the mantle. In Iceland, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge has risen above the ocean’s surface, lacerating the island with active volcanoes. Add to this a veneer of glaciers, and you have a geologic wonderland.

Iceland’s interesting topography can be seen beautifully on this map made up of elevation contours, or isolines. The country’s name brings bright white ice and cold blues to mind, but I think the brilliant reds in this map (the deep reds are the lowest elevations, the bright yellows are highest) better represent the intensely volcanic nature of Iceland. I fell in love with this map the first time I saw it — it was on a list of awesome maps the guys at CartoDB sent me to show the great stuff their platform can do. (Explore and zoom in on the map hosted on CartoDB.)

When I looked into it a bit more, it got even better. This map was made as a step in another project. Now, I’m a bit of a sucker for just about anything with a map on it and I also love notebooks and graph paper. So this graph-paper notebook with a topo map of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano pressed into it is one of my favorite things at the moment. And there are still some left if you’d like to buy your own.

The map and notebook were designed by Icelander Aitor García Rey (read about how he did it below). I contacted him, and it turns out he has plans to design more toponotebooks. Right now, he and his team are in the process of selecting the landforms for the new designs, and he’s agreed to let Map Lab’s readers help. They are planning a Kickstarter for October to fund the initial print run of 1,000 notebooks.

The next three notebooks will be islands. Below are some of the locations they are considering. Let us know in the poll which one you’d most like to have in your pocket. And, please suggest your own ideas — the criteria for the selections are: 1) Nice contour lines and general shape. 2) Interesting historical or social background. 3) Diversity of the first two criteria and of location.

Here are some satellite images of the islands. Vote in the survey below for your favorites.

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How this map was made

//non-map nerds need not continue reading

This notebook wasn’t the simplest project, and Rey details exactly how he did it on his website. As someone who is just at the beginning of trying to learn how to make maps, I think this is fantastic. I’ll give you a quick run down here.

Rey is a compulsive note taker, and always has a small notebook with him. Inspired by a data-designer friend of his Brian Suda, who is also into notebooks and designed some by tracing isolines from a map by hand in Illustrator. Rey wanted to do the same, but with more accuracy and less labor. So he went in search of data.

He zeroed in on Digital Elevation Models, which are digital raster representations of topography. He then found a DEM created by astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 2000. This Shuttle Radar Topography Mission mapped almost the whole globe’s topography, but unfortunately not most of Northern Europe, including Iceland. Still, Rey eventually found help from a Russian GIS expert named Yashin Aleksandr, who provided a DEM for Iceland.

As we have very quickly learned here at Map Lab, finding and wrangling the data is often the highest hurdle when making a map. So, clear sailing from here for Rey, right? Not exactly. He began searching for the tools for the next step and landed on GDAL, which he describes as “an amazing toolkit for geospatial data transformation that comes with a variety of great command line utilities.” (I am proud to say I understand most of that). Rey used GDAL to create isolines from the digital elevation model, and then did some stuff involving scripts and tiles and probably a lot of math and other stuff I don’t know how to do yet, and ended up with shapefiles.

He then went to CartoDB and started uploading the shapefiles, but quickly hit the data-size ceiling for a free CartoDB account. One of the map magicians at CartoDB, Javier Santana showed Rey how to wave the PostGIS wand at his data to optimize it, and voila: It all fit in, and out came the beautiful map you see above. But wait, this is not the end — we still need to get to the notebook.

The next step, for reasons I’m not yet clear on, was QGIS. I’ve only just started trying to understand QGIS (after downloading approximately a million pieces of software onto my computer), and, well, I’m gonna need some help to figure out how to use it. Rey says this about it: “Don’t let the ugly Qt interface fool you, this thing is really amazing, you can do all kind of crazy stuff like hairy city maps.” In QGIS, he started looking for nicely shaped topography and ended up settling on the glacier atop the Eyjafjallajökull volcano.

Rey used the Global Land Ice Measurements from Space to find the precise edge of the glacier. Then he exported the data as an SVG file and moved into Illustrator. There were way too many points to handle, so Rey used a simplification to remove millions of them, and then manually edited out all the obvious artifacts that had popped up along the way. Then, he sent the design off to a local printer, and 1,000 awesome little red notebooks came back.