What kind of map is this and where can I find it?

January 5, 2016 7:29 AM

I'm looking for maps that shows isolines for the distance to shore around the world. There are products like this, but they effectively show distance from airports, not the distance from the shoreline. Any ideas where I could find these sort of maps online? Is there a specific name for this type of map to make searching easier?
posted by cardboard to Travel & Transportation (5 answers total)

the word seems to be isodistance, but it turns out that isochrone (ie "isotime") is more popular, and more complex, because it takes into account wind speed etc for sailing boats.
posted by andrewcooke at 8:38 AM on January 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Looks like ESRI is developing a Distance from Shore map service, but it's in developer beta right now. I can't see anything but the thumbnail. Distance to/from shore is a parameter in many different marine science analyses, so it's a thing for sure, but I haven't seen the cartographic representation you describe very often. It seems more common to calculate the distance from points of interest rather than generate the isolines globally.
posted by bendybendy at 8:57 AM on January 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

That map looks like it took points from airports (publicly available data) and buffered them. It would be pretty easy to do with shorelines in a GIS program like ArcGIS or QGIS. Let me know if you want details to do this yourself.

You could also try searching for "GIS buffered shoreline", and sub in whatever extent (world, North America, SF Bay) you're interested in.
posted by hydrobatidae at 8:59 AM on January 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

Best answer: There's this world map on Wikipedia, which was created using the techniques described in this paper (PDF). The Wikipedia map is part of the "Pole of Inaccessibility" article, so if you want more detailed maps, you might try search on "pole of inaccessibility map".
posted by Johnny Assay at 9:28 AM on January 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Googling on the term "map of distance to the nearest coastline" from the Wikipedia Pole of Inaccessibility page got me this which is probably 90% of what I was looking for. GIS would get me 100% there, but I will settle for this out of the box solution.
Thanks everyone!
posted by cardboard at 11:50 AM on January 5, 2016 [3 favorites]